TXTNG: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal

So far I have seen only a review of this book.

I shall however be sourcing a copy and reading it. Some factors do cry out to be addressed though,
based on the review of it I have just read.

Firstly there is the tacit subtext that those of us who prefer to use Standard English are somehow
fuddy-duddy traditionalists with surplus stagnant
spleen Xu since the devent of hunting.
My first introduction to the world of the text was whilst playing in a band/loose jam combo about
8-6 years ago when they tended to be used for
impenetrably smug cryptomorphism that just
annoyed the recipients and ensured that the
messages themselves were thoroughly pointless
as, rather than being received and understood,
they just led, eventually, to fisticuffs in the wake of missed opportunities and unattended liaisons.
Since then it has been my misfortune to receive
any number of shoddy and unbusinessllike texts
from chancer-seeming employment agencies.
In the UK, at the moment, signing up for temporary work with an employment agency tends to mean
giving them enough personal information to pull off an identity fraud to the limit of your creditworthiness.

In return they enact a kind of mock-incompetence
that ultimately serves merely to limit their liabilities in terms of such factors as there actually be work there, you being actually paid for the hours you
worked, you being actually paid at the rate offered (NB, note "offered", as negotiation is taboo).
This being a business and/or commercial rather than social domestic or pleasurable use of language you might expect certain basic norms particularly in the case of equality of opportunity to non-native speakers, be met.
Not so.
Sadly it is not confined to the medium of the SMS text though. I have seen adverts in the official jobcentreplus jobsearchpoint terminals which look to have been
entered by way of speech-to-text in good faith by an executive with a malicious secretary who then put things wrong.
Simple things such as "manhandling experience" were enough to leave me with no confidence the organisation in question was competent.
One would not, after all, attend an interview for any kind of employment outside of recording studio receptionist and expect to be addressed in street jive or East Coast Gangsta. But TXTSPK is somehow exempt from this by way of being seen as universally cool, but only by the monogloches.
Similarly, while trumpeting the new form of lignuistic innovation, which genuinely does demonstrate Chomsky's generative minimalism as a rather more valid frame of reference than some contemporary linguisticians seem to believe, no metion is made of the flipside of TXTSPK or even its umbrella taxonome e-speak in terms of the pressure our young are under to conform to Simpsonian irreverence to the detriment of practising parallel encoding techniques.
In the absence of of true multi linguialism, in other words, are the young being encouraged to reap the benefits of code-switching? No, they're being pressganged into the ultrasimplicity of txtspk by their peers who, in age old form, are merely conspiring to drag them all down.
Given cyber bullying and ostracism games are particularly keenly felt amongst teens, perhaps such trumpeting as Crystal makes suggests he might like to spend a bit more time with real people rather than his cohorts of postgrads with points to prove.
Then again, from being expected to learn swatches of his earlier theory - or swathes, it matters not as you get my point anyway, which is his point - to realising how horribly wrong he has been on some things, I remain a committed critic of Crystal in the interests of academic rigour.

You'd think the scroll was the invention of the e-Screen age; you'd think there isn't a poem more than half a page long if you were to take the reviewer's refraction of Crystal's claptrap serisouly.
I look forward to reading the book. I look forward to finding fault with it. I shall be impressed if there is none, but the review itself tells me it is aimed at the parents who don't really talk to their children already.
G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 SIPSTON