Distracted by the bad news this weekend, I forgot to mention that my review of “txting: the gr8t db8” by David Crystal was in the LA Times on Sunday.
I looooove writing for the LA Times and this book was much fun. It’s pop-linguistics, if there is such a thing, lots of interesting factoids without the burden of too much research.
But sometimes the paper makes decisions that baffle me. After the last version of the review that I saw, every bit of copy that I had put in txtspeak — those that they hadn’t already converted to words, like “text” for “txt” — was italicized.
The whole point of the book is that using text messages is a natural part of our engagement with language. That it is a part of English, not something to be treated as a foreign language. Here’s an unitalicized paragraph, which I include here to relieve the knot forming near my left shoulder.
Text messages are not the fearsome products of limber-thumbed, anti-literate teenagers but an extension of long traditions, Crystal argues. He connects logograms like “2day” with rebuses, which date back to ancient Rome. Initialisms like IMHO (“in my humble opinion”) and JK (“just kidding”) owe a debt to, of all things, IOU. Recorded in 1618, it’s one of the earliest found in English. And while xtrctngvwlsfrm wrds may be unusual in English, it’s not in Arabic and Hebrew.
