Texting has definitely become mainstream. I received a text from my mother yesterday. She has succumbed to the electronics era. Welcome aboard, Mom!
She started texting for the same reason I did—to communicate with her children. I was a reluctant convert as well, asking, “Why can’t you just call me?”
However, I’ve come to really like texting. There are times when you can’t talk on the phone. Some people are annoyed to see someone typing into their cell phone in a meeting or at a restaurant table. I don’t mind—I know they may be touching base with a spouse or a child. They may be reading a message that says “Please pick up milk” or “Don’t forget the kids’ T-ball game today.”
I no longer see texting as antisocial; I see it as a way to connect to one another. And, truthfully, people who are reaching out to friends, family or coworkers via email are being polite.
A quiet text is much less disruptive than leaving a meeting or the dinner table to stand alone to make a phone call. And it is far less intrusive than a phone ring tone blaring and a noisy conversation.
Of course it can be taken to the extreme. I know there are some teens who sit next to one another, sending text messages instead of talking. That is a bit sad. But then again, you can send those cute little emoticons— happy faces, winking faces, or goofy cartoonish characters—in a text.
So in moderation, texting is okay.
Perhaps I don’t mind because the texting shorthand used comes naturally to me. I’ve been using my own personal shorthand to record meeting discussions for years. From my days as a radiology receptionist, I picked up a few interesting abbreviations, for example, TX or CX for transfer or condition.
Abbreviating
“before” as “B4” or
“you” as “U” is not entirely foreign to me.
Perhaps that is why my mom has taken to texting. She was a secretary and actually learned shorthand. She tells a story I just love about my dad’s mother, my Grandma Tressie.
Grandma kept a journal from the time she was a young girl living in Black River Falls, Wisconsin through her family’s journey to Mineral Center, Minnesota. She kept a log of daily life at Mineral Center, which included notes on when she met my grandfather, an immigrant from the Croatian region.
There were several strange notations unreadable to her children. However, one afternoon, sitting at the kitchen table at “the farm,” my mom realized that the secret notes were in shorthand. She began to decipher the entry—and Grandma snatched the diary from her hands, laughing and saying, “You little brat!”
So, texting—and shorthand— do have a purpose. As long as we’re communicating and recording memories, it’s all good.
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.
David Crystal
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