Is Txting Bad 4 English?
People tend to have definte opinions about texting. There are those who love it, and those who hate it. Among the haters, some have expressed their opinion in very strong terms. One British Journalist said that "texters are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbors 800 years ago. They are destroying... our punctuation...our sentences...our vocabulary. And they must be stopped."
This is not the first time people have said that technology was bad for language. In the 15th century, some scholars opposed the invention of the printing press. Common people shouldn't read books, there scholars argued, or the language might begin to reflect their common ways of thinking and speaking. More recently, the telegraph and then the telephone were also viewed as tool of linguistic destruction. And yet, the English language has survived.
There is reason to think that testing will not be any more harmful to the language than those past inventions. Research has shown that many of the claims made by text haters are not based on reality. These people especially dislike the way words in messages may be shortened, and numbers and symbols used instead of words. But only about 20 percent or fewer messages actually do contain these shorter forms. In most messages, traditional spellings and whole sentences are used. The reason for this is practical: the majority of senders are not teenagers, but schools, banks, or companies. They want to mark sure they will be understood.
Among texter who do use the shortened forms, certain forms appear frequently, such as C=see, U= you, and 4=for . However, there is also a lot of variation. That is because texting can actually be quite creative and fun. It could be considered a kind of word play, like doing crosswords or puzzles.