Language use

language use, etymology, and historical change

language use, etymology, and historical change

The Fight for English

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how language pundits ate, shot, and left

David Crystal is a prolific writer on the subject of English language and the way it is used. His output ranges from scholarly works of reference such as The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, to popular studies of modern usage such as his recent Words, Words, Words which tries to keep track of concepts of language. This latest book The Fight for English is his defence of descriptive grammar. In a sense it’s his riposte to the very popular work by Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves which knocked Harry Potter off the best-seller lists two or three years ago.

She was arguing for an adherence to traditional notions of grammar and correctness. Crystal is here saying that language changes all the time and that there is nothing you can do about it. What he offers is a historical tour through what has been written about the English language. This tour takes him from AElfric in 1000 AD to the present. Our language started with a cultural mix of Latin, English, and French (with English very much at the bottom of the prestige table) but all the time it was absorbing an enormous number of loan words. (This is why the lexicon in English is bigger than other languages – and why there are so many irregularities of spelling and grammar.)

The advent of printing began the process of standardisation – though it was hampered at first by lots of regional variations. Then early attempts at spelling reform were thwarted by lack of agreement between competing suggestions.

The first textbooks on grammar began to appear in the late sixteenth century and were followed by attempts to ‘regulate’ language via institutions such as the Royal Society. These too were unsuccessful – just as those of the Academie Francaise continue to be today.

Crystal has a high regard for Dr Johnson, compiler of the first really authoritative dictionary in English – but as he points out, even Johnson realised, after his monumental efforts to pin down the spelling and meaning of words, that language changes:

This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones; but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it.

He makes what can be a complex issue easy to understand by breaking his argument down into separate short chapters – Standards, Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling – and so on. And he presents the whole development of English as a constant flux, with tensions between linguistic pedants and actual popular usage. It’s a process which he sees as self-correcting:

Languages seem to operate with an unconsciously held system of checks and balances. If a group of people go wildly off in one linguistic direction, using a crate of new words, eventually—if they want to continue as part of society and be understood by its other members—they will be pulled back, and they will drop some of their neologisms. At the same time, a few of the new words will have been picked upon by the rest of the community. And so a language grows.

He mounts a vigorous attack on prescriptive grammarians, then the same on the pronunciation police – demolishing all their pontifications with the same argument – that the ‘standards’ which they claim to be absolute are often either recent innovations, or are already out of date.

The latter part of the book is an assessment of the current state of English language teaching in schools, and an explanation of why he finds hope in the National Curriculum, which he helped to frame. This is a user-friendly book, written in a plain-speaking style, and his arguments are ultimately convincing. But he’s not as funny as Lynne Truss.

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David Crystal, The Fight for English, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.256, ISBN: 0199229694

The Handbook of Good English

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guide to grammar, punctuation, usage, and style

Some writing guides are not much more than a list of grammatical rules, with illustrative examples and tips on what to avoid. Even though it uses grammatical elements as its structure, The Handbook of Good English is almost the opposite of that. Edward Johnson is an editor with a passion for language and the way it is used. What he seeks to explain is not just grammatical rules but the reasons why some forms of writing are more persuasive and elegant than others.

And he does this in a very leisurely manner, which is what makes this book so long – and comprehensive. He starts with sentences, then works his way to parts of speech and punctuation. At best, the examples and explanations he gives are good for being so succinct – as in his discussion of the gerund:

I dislike that man’s wearing a mask and I dislike that man wearing a mask are different statements. In the first, the wearing of the mask is disliked; in the second, the man is disliked. In the first statement, wearing is a gerund – that is, a special verb form that functions as a noun.

He covers every possible combination of circumstances which can arise to create problems: how to show quotations within quotations, dashes within parentheses, foreign words, and the titles of newspapers, plays, and the parts of a book. His thoroughness is almost exhausting. There are twenty-seven pages on the comma and thirty-four on the hyphen alone.

He’s what might be called a liberal or tolerant prescriptivist, because whilst permitting occasional exceptions, he does ultimately seek to establish rules:

the functionless comma does no harm, but nevertheless, commas that have no function should be omitted, just as words that have no function should be omitted (see Rule 1-4).

He takes full account of the differences between American and UK use of English, and it is interesting to note that (contrary to what UK traditionalists imagine) changes and influences operate in both directions.

Grammar issues apart, the chapter most readers will enjoy is his last – where he gives excellent advice on writing style. This covers subtle matters such as tone, diction, pace, attitude, and construction.

But at times, his approach is not so felicitous. I found it slightly annoying that a lot of his topics started off with bad examples. There are so many reasons why writing can be clumsy and ill-formed, this leads him into lengthy discussions of all the possible corrections and alternatives, after which he is forced to say:

It must be admitted that the correct versions of these sentences are much harder on the ear or eye than the incorrect versions, and that rewriting them would be advisable.

It’s a book which will probably be of most use to those people who already have a reasonable command of basic English, but who would like to know why some common grammatical problems are wrong or unacceptable – as well as how to put them right. In this sense it can be used as both a book of instruction or reference.

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Edward D. Johnson, The Handbook of Good English, New York: Washington Square Press, 1991, pp.426, ISBN: 0671707973

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The Life of Slang

March 9, 2012 by Roy Johnson

where slang comes from, and what it’s used for

The Life of Slang is a study of linguistic creation. We know that when a slang word is introduced into the language, it can become Standard English if it is adopted by enough people and put into general use. And of course the reverse can happen when a Standard English term is used in a new way and thereby becomes slang – which is what’s happened to the term gay since the end of the nineteenth century. In fact the process can continue, and by re-adoption the slang word is taken back into Standard English as a legitimate and additional meaning of the term.

People commonly object to slang when it is first introduced – particularly if it comes from another country such as Australia or the United States. But then resistance weakens (among some groups) and people become late adopters and start to embarrass their children by employing slang which is not a natural part of their verbal register – which is why the elderly Duchess of Cornwall made herself ridiculous by describing the engagement of her stepson (and future king of England) as ‘wicked’.

Another popular misconception is that the English language is somehow ‘infected’ by slang from other languages. This is simply not true. Some terms are found useful and adopted, others are not. You don’t hear English people using ditzy, which is a perfectly normal American term for silly or scatterbrained. And Americans refer slightingly to their own lower-class as ‘trailer trash’ not ‘chavs’. Both countries are selective about the terms they wish to borrow and use.

There’s also a longstanding belief that the use of slang impoverishes somebody’s verbal skills or their range of diction. Once again, there is no evidence to support this belief. Slang is simply an additional tool for communication which is used to mark attitudes to a topic or membership of a group. In fact all speakers can switch in and out of a variety of linguistic registers with no trouble. This is an endemic feature of language use.

In this very readable study of slang, Julie Coleman examines the way in which slang is formed – which turns out to be the same way as Standard English, through word-combination, back formation, and borrowings.

How it’s imported from other countries is a different matter. She puts a great deal of store on cross fertilization between British and American troops during the first world war – but this doesn’t seem altogether convincing, given the brevity of contact between the two forces.

There’s an analysis of literary texts from Chaucer onwards that seeks to provide evidence for her claim that the use of slang increases as time goes on. In fact she claims that slang was not commonly used before the renaissance, but admits that she has no evidence to prove it. She also covers slang from other English-speaking countries – Australia, New Zealand Canada, and even India

A great deal of her exposition is a historical account of underworld cant taken to Australia by transported British felons – and despite Australian national pride, developed from the early nineteenth century onwards. Australia is particularly rich in slang since it receives its linguistic influences from two English-speaking sources – both Britain and the United States.

There is a blurred distinction between slang and colloquialism or idiom which is not always easy to disentangle. Words such as wonga and moolah are not used for anything other than slang terms for money, whereas words such as knob and beef can be used in their conventional senses of handle and meat, as well as their common use as slang terms.

She covers terms generated by the press, the music hall, cinema, pop music, television, and radio – with a generous nod to Round the Horne which ‘preserved one form of slang [Polari] that might otherwise have fallen from use altogether’.

She finishes with a survey of the most rapidly developing field of new terms of all – computer technology and its users. The Internet is the ultimate democratic medium and also the most immediate. Events on one side of the world may now be made known on the other as they are happening – via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and video depositories such as YouTube.

Online dictionaries of slang compiled in the form of Wikis are known to vary greatly in their reliability and quality. Nevertheless, she gives a very respectful account of the user-generated Urban Dictionary. Then, after this fairly exhaustive survey she concludes by re-examining what is required in order to define slang – and it’s not easy.

It’s not necessarily new, or linguistically unusual, or associated with uneducated people, or necessarily vulgar. It’s not just colloquial language taken to an extreme. It doesn’t include dialect or jargon, although local and professional slang do occur. It doesn’t include swearing, though some swearing is slang. Neither is it restricted to the spoken language to the extent that it once was. It isn’t necessarily used for deliberate effect. Slanginess isn’t a quality of words or meanings: what’s slang in one context wouldn’t be slang in another.

In the end she opts to describe it as an attitude to language use which is recognised by fellow users in certain groups. This might seem disappointing to those seeking the reassurance of a quasi-scientific definition. But it strikes me as a step forward, a clearing of the decks from what was once thought to be a simple matter of making word lists and labelling the contents ‘slang’.

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&copy Roy Johnson 2012

Julie Coleman, The Life of Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp.354, ISBN: 0199571996

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The Myth of Mars and Venus

June 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Do men and women really speak different languages?

A notion has sprung up in the last decade or so that men and women use language differently – even that they are psychologically and genetically hard-wired for language in different ways. This notion has solidified around the expression ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’, which was the title of a book which became a best-seller in 1992. This current book is Deborah Cameron’s exploration of gender and language from the perspective of an academic specialist in the field.

Not to hold back on her conclusions unnecessarily, she points out that the notion is complete rubbish. There isn’t any proof or justification for it in any of the published research. There are only vague ‘surveys’ and pop-journalism which make claims which evaporate under the scrutiny of rigorous examination. So the question immediately arises – why is this myth so widespread and enthusiastically accepted as a universal truth? Why do people continue to believe it, when it’s not true?

The answer to that question is that like most myths, it is comforting. It panders to prejudice and reinforces stereotypes of both men and women. And it spares us the difficulty of looking more closely at what we think we are observing.

She looks at all sorts of research into the relationship between language and gender, and it all points to the same conclusions – that for any investigation, the context needs to be given; that larger samples need to be taken; that general conclusions about choice of vocabulary, volume of speech, interrupting, and verbal dominance cannot be made on grounds of gender without many other factors being taken into account.

Rather than speaking differently simply because they are women and men, women and men may differ in their patterns of language-use because they are engaged in different activities or are playing different conversational roles.

What one person thinks of as a supportive tag question (isn’t it?) is another person’s facilitation. It all points to the need for more scientific rigour before making rash claims.

The most serious argument she makes is that giving credence to these myths can be a dangerous reinforcement of prejudice against both men and women which when translated into social action can result in discrimination, persecution on gender lines, and even social exclusion.

She also backs up her claims with excursions into sociology and ethnography, illustrating the point that behaviour which is often seen as essentially gendered is just a different way of responding because of a particular role being enacted – irrespective of gender.

She actually takes this further, into areas which seem to border on the philosophy of human existence in a way which reminded me very much of the work of Stephen Pinker. The ‘explanations’ of language/gender difference which stem from Stone Age evolutionary psychology are examined under her clear, realistic gaze and shown to be wanting.

This is only a short book, but there are thought-provoking ideas on just about every page.

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Deborah Cameron, The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.208, ISBN: 0199550999

The Oxford History of English

December 24, 2012 by Roy Johnson

academic essays on the development of English language

This is an updated version of The Oxford History of English which is now available with the claim that it’s ‘a book for everyone interested in the English language, present and past’. A reasonable claim – though one might wish to add the caveat: ‘suitable for everyone embarking on detailed academic research into the history and mechanics of English’. Because it is certainly not for beginners. It offers a detailed and scholarly history of the English language, starting as far back as 1500BC.

And as Lynda Mugglestone’s useful introduction claims, the volume encompasses not only standard forms of English but also varieties stemming from geography, status and culture. The book comprises fourteen chapters, each written by a different linguist and representing a variety of interests, which makes the volume invaluable to students of linguistics up to post graduate level. Time-lines, language maps tables and charts complement the textual information. A phonemic table is also included and this is essential to the understanding of some language development explanations such as the Great Vowel Shift.

Nothing essential to the study of the English language is omitted and this is given zest by frequent examples from literary works or artefacts, and by the implicit enthusiasm shown by the contributors. For example, Marilyn Corrie quotes the original of a Middle English text, along with the translation, showing a homely but avid interest in study skills.

And whoever may wish to write this book out again on another occasion, I ask him that he write it correctly, just as this book teaches him.

This is a neat reminder that books at one time could only be copied by hand, one at a time.

North American English and its formation is dealt with, including citations of additions from Native American terms and usages – such as the native term Skunk. Other examples of English that have acquired semi-detached status are cited and these specifics are used to lead into the universal principles of language change, observable over thousands of years.

Techniques for the analysis of language mechanisms are eloquently explained in the chapter Dialects and Diversity. Reference to rhyme and poetic metre show the development in a quasi graphical manner that is very pleasing to read.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gets appropriate consideration as do various Anglo-Saxon sermons and poems. The advent of Christianity is used to demonstrate the gradual transition from paganism as reflected in poetry. The establishment of a written vernacular is documented with due reference to King Alfred as possibly the first educator in English, via The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The volume deals in detail with Germanic influences and the French influence that followed it. Issues such as ‘high’ and ‘low’ languages and the imprint left on a society after the departure of conquering nations are all included in a comprehensive and detailed history.

Considering more recent developments, Tom McArthur traces the status of English during the Twentieth Century with a quaint but comprehensive world map showing English language usage.

In his conclusion David Crystal not only charts the observable influences on English of the Internet and its devices, but he also gives his own prospective notions for the future of the language.

Each chapter is given its own lists of suggestions for further reading, and the book finishes with a huge bibliography. Although the level of detail is on a minute scale, the content is easily accessible, navigable and readable, given some prior knowledge on the part of the reader.

I would gladly give The Oxford History of English to anyone embarking on a language-based programme of study, or to any dedicated amateur student of the English language, its history and its prospects.

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Lynda Mugglestone (ed), The Oxford History of English, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp.600, ISBN: 0199660166

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The Real McCoy

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the true stories behind our everyday phrases and sayings

English is incredibly rich language, full of colorful and unusual phrases and sayings. This is one of those books which offers explanations for commonly used expressions. For instance, why do we say ‘know your onions’, ‘straight as a die’, and ‘the apple of your eye’? The answer in the last example is that the pupil was once supposed to be round. The Real McCoy is unusual as an expression in that nobody really knows its true origin.

Another typical example is ‘Mad as a hatter’. I knew this one, because it comes from the mercury poisoning used in felt hat manufacture – a former speciality in the town where I live. Most of the entries are very short. However, there are occasional special sections dealing with groups of – such as Biblical expressions, colours, eating and drinking, foreign countries, legends and myths, parts of the body and expressions coined by Shakespeare. Most of the entries are ploddingly obvious. I think that just about everybody knows that ‘full of beans’ means ‘lively and in high spirits’ and that the origin comes from vegetable protein.

However, there were one or two expressions I had certainly not thought about, such as ‘curry favour’ which has nothing to do with cooking or the Indian subcontinent, but comes from the expression curry as in to groom a horse with a coarse brush or comb.

And I certainly didn’t realise that a devil’s advocate was originally an official Catholic appointment during the process of beatification. The person’s role was to challenge the case being made for sainthood.

It’s an easy and lightweight approach to the subject. The entries come with no evidence or credible sources, and there’s no bibliography or list of further reading.

This could be useful as a Xmas or birthday present for someone who hasn’t yet thought much about the quirky nature of language. For something more substantial you will need to go to books such as The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms or Michael Quinion’s Port Out, Starboard Home.

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Georgia Hole, The Real McCoy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.200, ISBN: 0192806114

The Usual Suspects and Other Cliches

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

all the low down and the full monty on street-cred lingo

At first you might wonder why anybody would want to look into the origins of a cliché. But the more I read the examples in The Usual Suspects, the more they emphasise the tired, stale nature of expressions we often take for granted – or even worse, sometimes use without thinking first. This of course is based on the widely held belief that using cliché is a stylistically bad thing – though there are some people who actually defend them. (They can also be used ironically, but that isn’t taken up here.)

These issues are debated by Betty Kirkpatrick in the introductory essay to her collection which considers both the definition of cliché (when does an expression become a cliché for instance?) and the various categories of cliché. She debates intelligently with authorities such as Fowler and Eric Partridge and even considers how clichés blend easily into idioms, proverbs, catchphrases, vogue phrases, and allusions. Her entries run from the proverb cliché absence makes the heart grow fonder to You wish! and zero hour. She includes both traditional clichés, as in beat about the bush, and more recent usages such as spend more time with my family – which is what politicians and public figures say when they’ve been sacked – which neatly combines cliché with euphemism.

She also identifies what she calls ‘filler clichés’ such as at the end of the day, you know what I mean, and with all due respect. My own pet hates – used repeatedly, day after day by Sean Rafferty on BBC Radio 3 – are as it were and so to speak, both completely meaningless fillers which send me reaching for the off switch or tuning in to Jazz FM.

So a typical entry in this collection runs as follows:

push the envelope is an idiom cliché which is also a vogue cliché. It means to try to achieve more than seems possible, to take a risk, as A good coach is constantly driving the athlete to break new barriers, encouraging him to push the envelope. The cliché dates from the turn of the twentieth century, but the phrase may go back to early aviation test flights (1940s) where the ‘envelope’ refers to the line on a graph that represents the limit of an aircraft’s known capabilities.

It’s interesting to notice that in some clichés – such as flotsam and jetsam – the words in the phrase are almost never used separately from each other.

Most of the explanations listed are quite easy to understand – as in the case of to spend a penny. Even young people must know that this was once the standard charge for entering a public toilet. But maybe non-English readers will not. For this reason I suspect the book might be specially useful for people with English as a second or other language.

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Betty Kirkpatrick, The Usual Suspects and Other Clichés, London: A & C Black, 2005, pp.222, ISBN: 0713674962

Totally Weird and Wonderful Words

July 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a dictionary of obscure, unusual, and bizarre terms

Do you know what illecebrous, langsuir, and telematology mean? No – I thought not. They are ‘attractive’, ‘female vampire’, and ‘the study of peat bogs’ respectively. Not a lot of people know that. Of course, you might say that not many people would want to know that. But if you are one of the exceptions – people who are fascinated by etymology, unusual words, and obscure terms – Totally Weird and Wonderful Words is the book for you. It’s a collection of really out-of-the-way lexical items and words you have probably never heard of before. Entries run from abligurition (spending a lot on food) and abnormous (18th century, ‘mis-shapen’) to zoonosis (disease transmitted from animals to humans) and Zyrian (a north Russian language).

The alphabletised entries are interspersed with mini-essays on various categories of obscure terms, and laced with lots of New Yorker type cartoons. The weirdness of the entries might lie in a word’s obscure meaning, or it might be its unusual orthography – a strange conjunction of letters, as in kalokagathia (nobility and goodness of character).

It doesn’t pretend to be encyclopedic, but I was surprised that one of my own favourite obscure terms wasn’t in there. Borborygmous means ‘rumbling of gas in the stomach’ – and despite its quasi-medical connotations it always brings a smile to my face. But another of my favourites is included. Carphology is ‘the delirious fumbling with bedclothes prior to the onset of death’. Not a word you would need to use every day – but when applied at the right moment, very impressive.

Some which make sense (to a UK audience at least) are terms such as brannigans (the name of a chain of wine bars) which means ‘a drinking bout, a spree, or a binge’. And sometimes the examples are perfectly serious and reasonable – such as steganography, which is ‘the art of secret writing, or cryptography’.

Some are made up, such as igry, which is defined as ‘the way you feel when someone else does something that ought to embarrass them, but doesn’t’. Others are fanciful technical or quasi-scientific inventions.

There’s even a chapter at the end of the book giving you advice on how to create your own weird and wonderful words. However, you should remember that language is entirely democratic. New words will only ever become established if lots of people decide to use them – and that is usually because there’s a need for them. You could struggle for years putting together scientific and Latinate parts of speech – but unless there’s a real need for them, they will die unused. Meanwhile blogging, dogging, and gazumping have caught on because they serve a real purpose – though none are listed here.

Some of the words are clearly deft inventions; others are squeezed out of interpretations of classical terms (it helps if you know Latin and Greek); and others have interesting etymologies, but turn out to be disappointing. It’s interesting to know that there is a word for people who elect to have amputations for the sake of body modification, but somehow disappointing to learn that the word when you get there is only the rather plain nullo.

Some fall into the technical category of what might be called ‘extreme jargon’, as in the following definition of the term contango:

the fee that a buyer of stock pays to the seller to postpone transfer of the stock to the next or any future settlement date. It was also usually paid on a per share or percent basis. The word also has a modern meaning, ‘the condition in which distant delivery prices for futures exceed spot prices, often due to the costs of storing and insuring the commodity’. The antonym of contango is backwardation.

Phew! So now we know.

Many are so obscure it’s difficult to imagine there ever being an occasion when they might be used – either in conversation or in print – such as dromaeognathous, which means ‘having a palate like that of an emu’.

In keeping with its total weirdness, this is a book with three introductions and two forewards. In fact you can open it at any page and be amazed or amused – or both, simultaneously.

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Erin McKean (editor), Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.304, ISBN: 0195312120

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Troublesome Words

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

A-Z of problematic English words – with explanations

Before he became a best-selling travel writer, Bill Bryson worked as a sub-editor on The Times. This is a successful guide to problems of English language he wrote for journalists at the time, now updated and in its third edition. It’s arranged on an A to Z basis – running from abbreviations and acronyms, through mean and median (know the difference?) to wondrous, years’ time, and zoom. He explains words we commonly misunderstand, words we confuse, tricky issues such as foreign terms, and points of grammar such as split infinitives. And he does this with all the verve and wit which have made him such a well-loved writer.

He’s particularly good at showing the subtle distinctions between similar words (such as amid and amongst) and words which are easily confused (such as blatant and flagrant).

I couldn’t agree with him on data being a plural noun – but he does invite readers to challenge his judgements. You have to be on your intellectual toes. Sometimes his explanations are rather cryptic

Comprise means to contain. The whole comprises the parts and not vice versa.

But the correlative of this is that he packs a lot in. And occasionally this terseness works entirely to his advantage:

When something is not working properly, it is defective; when it is missing a necessary part, it is deficient.

The reason there are all these problems with English is that we have so many different terms for the same thing. Bill Bryson explains all this in his other excellent book Mother Tongue, to which this is a follow-up. He also throws in all sorts of extras – such as how to pronounce the name of the fish coelacanth (see-luh-kanth).

You will almost certainly learn about the meaning of words you never thought about before. Did you know the difference between ‘expectorate’ and ‘spit’ for instance?

There’s a very good bibliography and a glossary. Anybody interested in sharpening their writing skills will profit from reading this book. It’s a reference guide, a tutorial, and a very entertaining insight into language niceties for the general reader.

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Bill Bryson, Troublesome Words, London: Penguin Books, 3rd edn, 2009, pp.256, ISBN: 0141040394

Txtg: The Gr8 Db8

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

text messaging analysed, described, and defended

Ever since Text messaging first began there have been moans and complaints that it was lowering standards of literacy, corrupting our youth, and bringing about the collapse of Western civilization. Even the normally rational John Sutherland, writing in the Guardian, complained about texting:

Linguistically, it’s all pigs ear … it masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates.

David Crystal has answers for every one of these common objections. Texting isn’t even that new: writing in abbreviated forms has been around for a long time. Other languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic) do not use vowels as part of their writing system. In actual fact, the amount of abbreviating and acronyms such as ROFL is quite small. And most convincing of all to me, users in other languages all follow more or less the same ‘rules’ for abbreviation.

What’s more, the use of pictograms and logographs have been around for a long time; the rebus or word puzzle is an ancient tradition in UK and other cultures; and reducing terms to their initial letters is deeply enshrined in our culture – as in pm, NATO, eg, asap, OK, and GHQ.

The same is true for omitting letters, or ‘clipping’ as it’s known technically. Mr and Mrs are cases in point. Any form of word shortening makes complete sense in an SMS system, and nobody has any problem failing to recognise Tues(day), approx(imately), biog(raphy), mob(ile), gov(ernment), poss(ible), and uni(versity.

Crystal has a good chapter on the amazing literary aspirations of the SMS poets and writers – people who compose haikus, short stories, and even serial novels using this extraordinarily restricted form.

In terms of users, women are more adept and enthusiastic than men, and another interesting feature he reveals is that text messaging was late to take off in the USA – for two reasons. One was that phone calls were cheaper there, and the other is that many people need to drive to get about, unlike European countries and Japan, where the country is smaller and more people use public transport.

The content of text messages varies from personal greetings and co-ordinating social activity to political electioneering, advertising, and even schemes to quit smoking. Crystal lists plenty of examples which I imagine will be good stimulus material for the A level students doing language projects who will find this book particularly useful.

At a more advanced level, he also looks at how other languages handle text messaging. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that all of them do more or less the same thing, though some even mix English abbreviations with their own language – which is called ‘code-mixing’. This is an example from German:

mbsseg = mail back so schnell es geht (‘as fast as you can’)

He ends by allaying the fears of all those who think text messaging lowers any kind of standards of literacy, or communication. In fact the reverse is true. And to prove that he’s done his homework he ends with a huge glossary of terms and multiple lists of text message abbreviations in eleven different languages. U cnt gt btr thn tht!

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David Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.256, ISBN: 0199571333

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Language use

language use, etymology, and historical change

how language pundits ate, shot, and left

guide to grammar, punctuation, usage, and style

where slang comes from, and what it’s used for

Do men and women really speak different languages?

academic essays on the development of English language

the true stories behind our everyday phrases and sayings

all the low down and the full monty on street-cred lingo

a dictionary of obscure, unusual, and bizarre terms

A-Z of problematic English words – with explanations

text messaging analysed, described, and defended

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