I H8 Txt Msgs: argue/Response CourseWork

Dear John Humphrys,

I have read your article in the Daily Mail and I am completely against your point of view. I believe that your idea of text messages ruining the English language is false. The English language isn’t being ruined by technology; how can you argue that a powerful new form of communication can ruin a language? What you should really be saying is that language is being ruined by the people in possession of these devices. This opinion is also false. Technology crosses all sorts of geographical and physical barriers: it gives you the opportunity to never miss-spell anything again with auto-correct: there is now predictive text which speeds communication massively you can communicate in real-time, whereas in the past you would have to wait for a couple of days to receive a letter (or a week to receive one by pigeon).

You say you don’t like the way  technology is moving: ‘my own outgoing messages asks callers to be very brief, ideally just name and number, but that doesn’t stop some callers burbling on for ten minutes and always, always ending by saying: “Ooh sorry I went on for so long!”‘. As far as voice mail is concerned, I don’t really know anyone apart from my grandmother who uses it – it’s certainly not a common thing for me to receive, in fact I can’t remember the last time I have received one. The reason why people don’t use it is probably because it’s a lot easier to just send a text message rather than send a voicemail that you can barely understand. As for emojis, I can’t really remember the last person who has used one for a serious reason; they’re a way of having fun texting someone a message instead of typing plain black text.

‘It is the relentless onward march of the ‘texters’, the SMS (short message service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his to his neighbours eight hundred years ago’. I think that your views here are very old-fashioned. It seems that you could have more in common with Genghis Khan: “It began with some fairly obvious and relatively inoffensive abbreviations: ‘tks’ for ‘thanks’; ‘u’ for ‘you’; 4 for ‘for'”. You are so out of touch, and when it comes to abbreviated words you are extremely out of date. No one uses ‘tks’ for thanks or ‘4’ for four. You cannot exactly criticise the ‘SMS vandals’ for using abbreviations, when you yourself are an employee of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). No one really wants to say that when it’s such a mouthful, so what’s the problem with SMS? Abbreviations like these are easier to say and less longwinded   (sorry long-winded) – unlike your article. You describe searching through a paperback OED (Oxford English Dictionary) as a “voyage of discovery”. But online dictionaries are so much quicker. Looking up a word online gives a really fast response, plus you can discover more about a word e.g multiple definitions and the history of that word; not only can you find out more about it, you can learn that word in multiple languages and their origins.

‘It is interesting in a masochistic sort of way, to look at how text language has changed over the years’. I don’t understand that you have the need to point this out. The English language owes a great debt to Shakespeare. The words that you are using are extremely over exaggerated; with words like ‘masochistic’ and ‘grotesque’ you are putting (who I guess is your hero) William Shakespeare’s innovative use of language to shame. In his time he invented over 1700 new words ranging from ‘amazement’ to ‘worthless’. He played around with language and broke all grammar rules by changing nouns into verbs, joining words together and making up completely new ones. Surely what everyone enjoys about language is that it is constantly changing? What you are doing, John, is trying to preserve it forever and in the end that would kill it.

Urs Sterling Oldroyd