TXTNG: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal

So far I have seen only a review of this book.

<insert abuse here>

I shall however be sourcing a copy and reading it.
Some factors do cry out to be addressed though,
based on the review of it I have just read.

<insert abuse here>

Firstly there is the tacit subtext that those of us
who prefer to use Standard English are somehow
fuddy-duddy traditionalists with surplus stagnant
spleen Xu since the devent of hunting.

My first introduction to the world of the text was
whilst playing in a band/loose jam combo about
8-6 years ago when they tended to be used for
impenetrably smug cryptomorphism that just
annoyed the recipients and ensured that the
messages themselves were thoroughly pointless
as, rather than being received and understood,
they just led, eventually, to fisticuffs in the wake
of missed opportunities and unattended liaisons.

Since then it has been my misfortune to receive
any number of shoddy and unbusinessllike texts
from chancer-seeming employment agencies.

In the UK, at the moment, signing up for temporary
work with an employment agency tends to mean
giving them enough personal information to pull off
an identity fraud to the limit of your creditworthiness.

In return they enact a kind of mock-incompetence
that ultimately serves merely to limit their liabilities
in terms of such factors as there actually be work
there, you being actually paid for the hours you
worked, you being actually paid at the rate offered
(NB, note "offered", as negotiation is taboo).

This being a business and/or commercial rather than
social domestic or pleasurable use of language you
might expect certain basic norms--particularly in the
case of equality of opportunity to non-native speakers,
be met.

Not so.

Sadly it is not confined to the medium of the SMS text
though. I have seen adverts in the official jobcentreplus
jobsearchpoint terminals which look to have been
entered by way of speech-to-text in good faith by an
executive with a malicious secretary who then put things
wrong.

Simple things such as "manhandling experience" were
enough to leave me with no confidence the organisation
in question was competent.

One would not, after all, attend an interview for any kind
of employment outside of recording studio receptionist
and expect to be addressed in street jive or East Coast
Gangsta. But TXTSPK is somehow exempt from this by
way of being seen as universally cool, but only by the
monogloches.

Similarly, while trumpeting the new form of lignuistic
innovation, which genuinely does demonstrate Chomsky's
generative minimalism as a rather more valid frame of
reference than some contemporary linguisticians seem
to believe, no metion is made of the flipside of TXTSPK
or even its umbrella taxonome e-speak in terms of the
pressure our young are under to conform to Simpsonian
irreverence to the detriment of practising parallel encoding
techniques.

In the absence of of true multi linguialism, in other words,
are the young being encouraged to reap the benefits of
code-switching? No, they're being pressganged into the
ultrasimplicity of txtspk by their peers who, in age old form,
are merely conspiring to drag them all down.

Given cyber bullying and ostracism games are particularly
keenly felt amongst teens, perhaps such trumpeting as
Crystal makes suggests he might like to spend a bit more
time with real people rather than his cohorts of postgrads
with points to prove.

Then again, from being expected to learn swatches of his
earlier theory - or swathes, it matters not as you get my
point anyway, which is his point - to realising how horribly
wrong he has been on some things, I remain a committed
critic of Crystal in the interests of academic rigour.

You'd think the scroll was the invention of the e-Screen
age; you'd think there isn't a poem more than half a page
long if you were to take the reviewer's refraction of Crystal's
claptrap serisouly.

I look forward to reading the book. I look forward to finding
fault with it. I shall be impressed if there is none, but the
review itself tells me it is aimed at the parents who don't
really talk to their children already.

G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 SIPSTON
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date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 04:00:32 -0700 (PDT) author: FCS