This morning I asked my teenage son, as he was putting on his hoody, whether he felt his powers of language were being diminished by the abbreviated “teen-speak” of text messages.
“m i bvrd? lol,” he replied. “c u l8r.”
Jean Gross, the Government’s new children’s communications czar, reportedly believes that our children are now using a day-to-day vocabulary of only 800 words, because they are “communicating through electronic media and text messaging”.
(The whole czar thing is becoming rather debased by overuse. There are plenty of other ancient Russian titles, such as Chief Portion Steward and Chamber Fourrier, that would fit these lowlier government posts better. Personally I like the idea of a Children’s Communication Boyar.) Is childhood language really shrinking? Or are teenagers simply talking about things that do not concern adults in an abbreviated, semi-secret language, just as they have always done? Throughout my teenage years I certainly communicated with my parents by means of ill-tempered grunts that appear in no dictionary.
What we call textese today is far older than the mobile phone. The word puzzle that uses letters as abbreviations for whole words has been around for hundreds of years and is known as a rebus (from the Latin meaning “by things”), a word that was also the inspired choice of name for Ian Rankin’s detective, Inspector Rebus.
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Victorian escorts distributed cards reading “May I.C.U. Home?” as if the delicacy of the single-letter abbreviation somehow obscured the indelicacy of the suggestion. But possibly the earliest precursor of textspeak, complete with pictograms, was a 17th-century exchange in which Frederick the Great invited Voltaire to supper at Sanssouci Palace.
Frederick sent a message consisting of a picture of two hands below the letter P, and the number 100 below a picture of a saw. This translates as “deux mains sous Pe, cent sous scie”, which, if you say it, comes out as “demain souper, Sanssouci?” or “Supper tomorrow, Sanssouci?” Voltaire replied simply: “Ga!” Big G, small a — G? grand, A petit, which reads as “j’ai grand app?tit!” or “I am very hungry!”
The vocabulary of children may be shrinking but this is more, I suspect, the result of generally declining literacy than texting. In some ways textese is a traditional form of wordplay; a youthful slang deliberately shortened to cock a snook at convention, and a playful experiment with the sounds and shapes of words. As David Crystal points out in his excellent A Little Book of Language, to be published by Yale University Press in March: “If it’s cool to leave letters out, we have to know they’re there in the first place . . . the best texters are the best spellers.”
A new form of language, invented by the young for the young and involving imagination and wit, is surely to be welcomed, not bemoaned. You can even write poetry in it:
quik hurry up text me tell me u luv me tell me how much u want me tell me im da 1 oops wrong person i sent it 2 my mum