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This book takes a long hard look at the text-messaging phenomenon and its effects on literacy, language, and society. Young people who seem to spend much of their time texting sometimes appear unable or unwilling to write much else. Media outrage has ensued. "It is bleak, bald, sad shorthand," writes a commentator in the UK Guardian. "It masks dyslexia, poor spelling, and mental laziness." Exam answers using textese and reports that examiners find them acceptable have led to headlines in the tabloids and leaders in the qualities.Do young people text as much as people think? Do adults? Does texting spell the end of literacy? Is there a panic in the media? David Crystal looks at the evidence. He investigates how texting began and who uses it, why and what for. He shows how to interpret its mix of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay, and how it works in different languages. He explores the ways similar devices have been used in different eras and discovers that the texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back a long way, all the way in fact to the origins of writing - and he concludes that far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• List of Cartoons
• 1 The Hype About Texting
• 2 How Weird is Texting?
• 3 What is Distinctive About it?
• 4 Why do They do it?5. Who Texts?
• 6 What do They Text About?
• 7 How do Other Languages do it?
• 8 Why all the Fuss?
• Glossary
• Appendix
• Index

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CHOICE Review

In this witty, insightful work, Crystal (Univ. of Wales, UK) examines the phenomenon of text messaging, notably in terms of its impact on language and society. An authoritative, accessible writer, Crystal is the author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (CH, Jun'88), Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (CH, Nov'95, 33-1255; 2nd ed., CH, Feb'04, 41-3145), and myriad other books on language. Here he considers such aspects of texting as form, content, social context, and uniqueness, both in English and in other languages. Much as he did in Language and the Internet (CH, Apr'02, 39-4397), Crystal cuts through the exaggerations about the dire impact of the medium on language and places texting in context, i.e., he looks at it as yet another way in which language continues to evolve. Including a glossary of texting-related terms, appendixes of text abbreviations in English and 11 other languages, and a solid index, this book serves both as an excellent introduction to texting for the uninitiated and as a scholarly resource for those who study the phenomenon. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. G. A. Mayer SUNY College at Oneonta

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

David Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor.