by YWee
Diary Adventures of a LagosMum: Texting and English!
Nov 15, 2011 at 10:14 pm in Bloggers, Diary Adventures of LagosMums, Featured by YWee
Texting destroying the English Language?…..
Who else is alarmed by the rate at which texting and shortening the written English word is threatening to destroy the English language?
Everywhere I turn someone who is trying to save their phone credit is slashing a word down, changing the spelling, substituting acronyms that would make the Webster dictionary cry! Even those marketing texts are guilty of this. I am guilty myself and find it is a bit of a sport to trim down the number of words in a text message so it can fit on one page versus spill into two pages. But some people are advanced in this business…many times I find myself scratching my head to decipher this new “text” word that has been introduced (I found an online dictionary for text message translator ).
Now comes blackberry messaging and the same thing applies, even though this is not subject to credit, hello you don’t pay per bb message so why still do people shorten their words? I think it is now pure laziness o! People can’t be bothered to spell any longer or another scary thought they can’t remember the correct spellings? Instead of “the” everyone defaults to “d” and so many other “cutesy” ways to re-spell any given word and save one or two alphabets.
The worrying trend though is the school children, and a generation who is getting used to this way of writing and not able to cut it off when they are in a professional setting. How many of you have gotten (or sent) an email with badly written English with use of “texting” language instead of proper English?
It is bad o! The damage this phenomenon is causing is huge. The real challenge is to find a way to balance this less is more way of writing to only social media….yes we know twitter can only take so many characters…..but you don’t want to be seen as unprofessional or even lose a job because you can’t craft a proper email or document without using texting language.
One way to deal with this is discipline to use P-R-O-P-E-R English all the time. The benefit of this decision to use proper english all the time far outweighs the slippery slope where you don’t realize that your text has ended and now you are writing up an essay, an official document or internal memo via email!
“Dear Managrager I wanted 2 check dat d order from d shop was delivered”.
How do we move proper English forward? For me I have pledged to use the correct spelling of a word everytime.
HBD- happy birthday/ LLnP – Long Life and Prosperity / HWA – Happy Wedding Anniversary/ HML – Happy Married Life/SMH – shaking my head! And so on and so forth. *thoroughlly annoying*
It is incredible how you took this blog off my mouth!
I am so disheartened by the ‘slaughter’ and the slicing of the English Language! I am so sad that the advancement of technology just may turn many into lazy slobs and very poor communicators!
Have you noticed how everything now has short forms? HBD, LLnP, HML, HWA etc etc…incredible, simply amazing, in a bad way!
Its not the limitation by the number of characters, I believe it is pure laziness. Nothing is more annoying than typing ‘kk’ or ‘k’ instead of ‘ok!’. Haba!
I shall blog this on my blog. Thanks for ‘crying out!’
Like Ugo above, I had to beg my father to text me just as I text him; in concise language, with very minimal short forms. Have a headache because you want to read a message that should otherwise give you pleasure?? Please!
Zainab you introduced some new short forms that have me sratching my head o…what are LLnP, HML, HWA….:)
It does seem that this issue of texting english and shortening words has been bothering quite a few people!
I understand it’s called Short Message Service(SMS) and not Abbreviated Message Service(ABS). If you must say it then keep it short and simple! I think it is our not being able to say what we have to within a short length of space that makes us abbreviate. I thought i was in another planet when on my birthday i got a message on facebook teeling me: HBD LLNP. It took me asking my younger sister to decipher what it meant. The one that gets to me most is even shortening the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.Writing IJN after a prayer i think its disrespectful to our savior to say the least. If you must text a prayer, make it short and write in Jesus name IN FULL PLEASE.
…guess, it’s just a habit that wouldn’t leave…anyway, i adopted all kinds of shorthands, even shorthands of shorthand when i was young and testing aggravated it, but i guess i always know when it is appropriate and when not…u can imagine me writing b(and a veined leaf) as believe but still scripting the best of official prose when occasion demands it…but for the younger generation, it is good to worry…but i strongly believe that the English language is certainly the most living language, always evolving, always adopting, always absorbing, so it might just be experiencing a rebirth under our eyes…thou…you…u,liveth…lives…liv…e.t.c
so true. i am guilty of this but i am not so bad. sometimes i find it very hard to understand what they are saying and it gives me such a headache.
it is bad on some pple part when part when you cant get the message sent. I am guilty of the same offend but not that bad but let’s not try to kill the language.
I’m new here.And i love this forum.The use of “texting” language slightly affected my writing skills.I had to consciously work on it.Every parent should make an extra effort to prevent their children from learning this culture.
Well, my dad shortens his text msgs more than me. worries me, i tell u, cos this is a man that banned pidgin english in his house when we were growing up, and if you didn’t write properly, he’d refuse to read your emails.
Hi, this is my first time here and I like the use of green colour on your blog. Really nice and urban.
I used to think that it was only me that got pissed off at text messages written in shorthand. Phew, most times I just struggle with decoding those shorthand words. I got one that really upset me, it was from my younger cousin and she wanted to ask for assistance. I tried hard to understand the messsage and eventually ended up not responding positively because it gave me a headache. I didn’t fail to blast her.
Like you rightly said, I guess the fact that we are in the age of text messages limited to 160 characters makes people want to squeeze the words to fit. Nevertheless, people should learn to know the difference between informal and formal communication.
As once blogged on harvard Business Review, a person may reduce his/her brand and possibly job by using shorthand in communication. I hope it does not become a standard.
Know who you are writing to before you enter shorthand mode. Cheers