The demise of the English language – text talk.

Over recent years I really have taken to texting quite a lot, I always make sure that I have a phone contract that has unlimited text messages in the bundle. To me this is much more important than call time as I really am not one for chatting endlessly, anyway, I have the home phone for that.

I’d say I can easily sent 20 or 30 text messages a day, normally to the same person and always in plain English.  One of the things that really winds me up is text talk. 

When I met my wife we were introduced by a third party, it was sort of a Blind date only we started talking before we decided to meet so it was a partially sighted date I guess.

I was told of her existence and she was made aware of me and our phone numbers were exchanged and then the day came when the first contact was made and I sent a message introducing myself and a few minutes later came the reply….to my great relief the reply was eloquently written with no spelling mistakes and none of the words had been replaced by numbers.  I really do not know how I would have reacted if the message had come back as “Thanx 4 da msg, am gud ta. Look 4ward 2 seein u nxt wk.” or some other abomination of the English language but I am confident that I would have quickly lost interest in the resulting responses and we could both have missed out on a life changing event.  I mean, how can you continue to attempt to get to know someone when you spend more time trying to work out what they are trying to say than actually indulging in the conversation?

Having said that, she has a Smart phone now and we have a completely different issue, I may even provide a few examples at a later date of how phones change words and the text message can mean something completely different.