Hey, look everyone, another news article about how text-messaging children are killing the English language.
People who don’t write and speak in coherent sentences, Morreau says, don’t succeed in communication. He is especially concerned about “the death of the good sentence” — one that imparts clear and concise information.
And this is where the idiocy of this claim really comes to light: the people perpetuating this risible notion that stupid children will be responsible for the downfall of English are missing the point. So called “txt speak”, if anything, has the exact opposite effect these people seem to think it has; it aids communication. Cutting a long sentence down to only a few characters means all the cruft gets cut and only the essential facts remain. As far as communication goes, txt speak is a particularly useful tool. Our beloved children may not be littering their prose with perfectly-formed sentences and polysyllabic locution when they send a text message, but that fact is not synonymous with losing the ability of critical thought. Nor with the demise of the English language. If there’s a problem with young peoples’ grasp of their language, it’s the teaching that’s at fault, not the technology.
That’s not to say I support omitting various vowels and punctuation from online communication; I’m as anti-txt speak as anyone else. But please, it’s not causing the English language any lasting damage.
The New York Times reported that the crowd laughed when Billington, at the presentation of the report, sounded the alarm about “the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought — the sentence.”
Well, we should take some solace in the fact that not everyone in the world has gone mad just yet.
Side note: The phrase “sentence fragging” is used in this article completely without irony.
Incidentally, why is it always the English language that is dying? The Japanese have their own form of txt speak called Gyaru-Moji (Gyaru-Moji on Wikipedia), yet I haven’t seen any news articles with quotes from wide-eyed Japanese “intellectuals” professing the eventual ruination of Japanese.