In Kristina Mialki’s article, “Texting: A Boon, Not A Threat, To Language”, she discusses her thoughts on how texting is not deteriorating the English language as people think, but expanding it. I do not completely agree. Sure, it is adding new ways of speaking already-existent words to a person’s vocabulary, but I do think it is making the English language more sloppy to those who text. She says that texting “encourages creative use of language” (Mialki), but it just does not look like that to me.
I texted for a little while, and, in my experience, saw people being lazy with their words, not inventing new ways to use them. There are of course all of those acronyms for common phrases, such as LOL, OMG, WTH, or ATM, which mean laugh out loud, oh my god, what the hell, and at the moment, respectively. But really it is just the use of the same acronyms heard from others over and over again, and in this article the way she words it makes it seem like texters are inventing new words and shortened phrases in most of their texts. If they were to do this on a daily basis a lot of their friends would be asking them what it means, and with the quick-communication an short responses usual to texting I do not think most texters will want the hassle.
When texting, people that I have texted with at least, are generally lazy and do not put too much effort into typing out the words or using correct capitalization and punctuation. Sure, it’s easy, but after a while I saw it start to creep into their classroom assignments. I myself started to pick up habits that I would use while typing, such as using lowercase I’s when they were supposed to be capitalized, and starting sentences with lowercase letters.
“Not surprisingly, unwarranted fears that texting will destroy the language often focus on this group” (Mialki), is what Mialki says people are putting on young people. Though not likely that the group will be responsible for destroying the language, this age group has always been the source of new phrases and words that have been integrated into everyday language. These words, such as “bonkers”, or “wazzup” most likely originated with a play on words in youthful society. Young people are making long words shorter for the sake or shorter conversation, or laziness, I do not know, but it will be interesting to see how much more this plays out in the future. I do not expect language to become mostly three-letter words in the very distant future, but it sure is possilble. I sure do hope that the increased amount of texting and use of internet does not impede the use of proper grammar and spelling. Mialki mentions “Just as most young people know not to talk to their teachers the way they talk to their friends, they know not to write their papers the way they write text messages” (Mialki). But as technology becomes more and more integrated into the classroom, there is a chance that the “Textese”, as Mialki calls it, may start to push its way into the learning setting and I hope it does not do so in a bad way. I hope that if the English language integrates the use of acronyms such as LOL, it does so when the term is used by most of the population.
Mialki, Kristina. “Texting: A Boon Not a Threat to Language”. Practical Argument, Ed. Laurie G Kirszner and Stephen R Mandell. Boston:New York, 2011. 363-364. Print.
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