Txtng: The Gr8 Db8This book takes a long hard look at the text-messaging phenomenon and its effects on literacy, language, and society. Young people who seem to spend much of their time texting sometimes appear unable or unwilling to write much else. Media outrage has ensued. "It is bleak, bald, sad shorthand," writes a commentator in the UK Guardian. "It masks dyslexia, poor spelling, and mental laziness." Exam answers using textese and reports that examiners find them acceptable have led to headlines in the tabloids and leaders in the qualities. Do young people text as much as people think? Do adults? Does texting spell the end of literacy? Is there a panic in the media? David Crystal looks at the evidence. He investigates how texting began and who uses it, why and what for. He shows how to interpret its mix of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay, and how it works in different languages. He explores the ways similar devices have been used in different eras and discovers that the texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back a long way, all the way in fact to the origins of writing - and he concludes that far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it. Contents List |
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Abbreviation Full form alert alphabet apostrophe Benjamin Zephaniah called capitalization cent were woken Chapter characters chat chatroom Chinese Clare Wood computer-mediated communication Czech alphabet develop emoticons example floor laughing fone form English gloss French Full form English genre initial letters instant messaging intentionally left blank Internet Italian Japanese keitai key-presses keypad kind kisses linguistic literacy logograms ludic ludic language means Mizuko Ito mobile communications mobile phone moral panic nonstandard spellings orthography pinyin poem problem pronounced punctuation reported screen seen sender sent sentence sequence shorten words social someone standard English style symbols talk teenagers text abbreviations text language text messages texters texting conventions textisms textspeak thing Txtng U. A. Fanthorpe usage users variety of language vowels websites Welsh wireless writing system written young