Slightly off topic, but maybe the txters will Darwin themselves out of humanity...

From WINK news

 

I have no cell phone, but I still have to deal with it in games and such.

I can sort of tolerate it in real-time chat environments. Although it's still incredibly annoying.
In message boards it's definitely unacceptable.

 

I text more than talk. Mostly because I just think of various little important things through out the day, and making a bunch of phone calls to inform someone of something that would take 3 seconds to say seems pointless.

However, the people that just text giant fricking messages several paragraphs long need to have their phones taken away. For instance, my parents. There's no need to just stand there for 5 minutes staring at your phone and typing, if it's that big of a message, just call the person, it's quicker.

 

I hate texting. Of course my phone, Samsung Juke, isn't exactly "text friendly" Also the fact that my fingers just seem to be too slow doesn't help  
AND I hate getting stuck behind people on the sidewalk who are going really really slow because they are too busy typing on the little buttons to actually pay attention to where they are going! *Sorry, rant over.*  

CS  

 

Other than not using a capital "I" when texting, I type ever thing in english.
If your going to intentionally miss-spell your words, why not take the time to spell them right>

That or I could be confusing text speak with the dumb-asses on myspace spelling crap like "g3t w!t !t 0r g3t l0s3" (Real name from my school's myspace)

 

i dno wut u guys r so mad about lol

 

I find about 99% of it annoying. WTF?, 4, 2, R, B, and U are the only ones I typically use as they all sound the same as the words they are substituted for. Mainly to cut characters out to keep the message smaller, yet stay readable. I also make it a point to capitalize B, U, & R to distinguish them as actual abbreviations rather than errors. If the message is really short, I type everything out. I also usually text as it's cheaper than calling and it's an easy way to get a quick answer if all I have is a single question.

It's also convenient if the person who receives the text is busy and can't commit to a phone response, but can send a reply in a matter of seconds. One of my most common text messages is "Call me when you get a chance."

 

You can reply to someone faster talking in real time than in a text.
Unless you stutter or something. I've had 1-2 second phone calls.

 

I find "lol" and variations thereof acceptable. I don't use it to say "laughing out loud," I use it to indicate that something is funny without saying, "Hey, that's very funny." HAHAHAHAHA would be a little weird.

 

I'm not a fan of "TXT TALK" myself. It really bothers me when the person is too busy to add in the one missing letter (eg. TEXT TALK -- I'm not picking on the OP here). How much time are you honestly saving?

On the topic of texting itself... still not a fan. I could write out my message on a piece of paper and physically mail it to the person in the same amount of time it would take me to send a text message. My phone sucks.

 

For the Chicken Littles who predict that TXT TALK fortells the doom of the English language, I submit this letter to the editor from the greatest English language magazine ever, the insightful criticism Lance sent me nonwithstanding.

The take-home point, of course, is that our language today is hardly as elaborate as that of Ye Olde English, and yet we seem to manage just fine. Natural evolution is...well, natural, and happens to many things, linguistic conventions among them.

Oh, and for posterity's sake, the letter was was in response to this article, which should be viewable.

 

There's a LOT of truth to this article.

I've got an English minor, I'm the son of an English teacher, and I'm married to an English teacher, so irritation with text speak is almost a given.

HOWEVER, my linguistics teacher in college repeatedly reminded us that while we may find "violations" of grammatical standards to be irritating, language is always evolving. Spanglish, Ebonics, Textspeak... all culture-based linguistic influences that affect the established standards. The English language will look quite different from generation to generation, based on the worldwide integration of cultures. One teacher I had suggested that within a hundred years, English, French, and Spanish will be nearly integrated into one language. Interesting stuff.

But I do find it interesting that non-native English speakers (Nevermore, for example) can come on this board and consistently use perfect grammar and punctuation, while us folks from North America still can't get our there, their, and they're, your, you're and to, too, and two right.  

And my personal favorite... "should OF" and "would OF" *cringe*

 

Spanglish and Ebonics aren't languages just bad English.

 

Yeah, Bimma shames me. And most of the board, for that matter.

I do agree with your teacher's prediction, although I think it will take longer than a hundred years, and I suspect Spanish and English will merge well before French joins them, due solely to geographic factors.

Seriously, guy, did you read the post? He wasn't saying that they were--he was pointing out that both are examples of natural and inexorable linguistic change.

If they're poor English--and certainly, there's a valid argument that they are--then the English in use today is similarly poor when evaluated under the standards of a hundred or five hundred years ago. But that's not a reasonable standard for my English...and our standard today is debatably not a reasonable standard to use for Ebonics or Spanglish when discussing the future of English.

 

I hate it, really hate it. I made sure I purchased a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard on it so I could type full words at a reasonable pace. People who text me with that nonsense in their message seldom get replies from me, if ever.

 

I'm in the same boat.

 

Seriously, Chinese Mandarin is my nature tongue, and been learning Russian & Indonesian on recent years, but when I come into interaction with things that require adequate English, such as internet forum, making an international phone call, taking care of passports n stuffs, or others, I always try my best to come out with perfect grammar, correct spelling and pronounces. But then I realized how the basic use and application of language have changed on recent years, it is really sad to notice that people these days, especially teens, prefer to speak and replying text messages with Textspeaks.

I mean, if you could put time and efforts on intentionally misspelling words, you could also do the same for intentionally spelling the words RIGHT. I know, I understand it's for the sake of simplicity, like some people said. But if this keep going on, I'm afraid 2 - 3 generations ahead of now, the future of languages, especially English, won't be good.

Oh, and also, one thing that I discover upon joining international English-speaking message boards, is that I came in with perfect English just so I could assimilate more into the related society, but then when I saw even the native English speakers themselves are having hard time with right spelling and such (which is whether intentional or not), and preferred 1337-t4lk over the proper English language, I felt like I just jumped into a "proper-English-speaking" bandwagon, but come to realize that the bandwagon already been left by the others.

 

I type like that in AIM and texts, even on my iPod Touch and phone with a QWERTY keyboard

 

I do it on xbox live sometimes, cause I use a joystick to scroll around a lame keyboard, dont want to take 20 minutes on a message and send someone a big ass paragraph to read as I interrupt their gaming zen