2b Or Not Twob By Professor David Crystal

Texting has for a long time been heralded as the demonized friend of the preteen middle schooler, the destroyer of all that is considered holy and well of the English language with its mess of letters, unpunctuated and lacking structure. Fueled on by media and a scholarly few, the idea took root that texting is a show of immaturity and illiteracy. The article “2b or Not 2b?” written by Professor David Crystal goes against this idea and tries its hand at tearing the stereotype apart. He explains that texting has created no new evil to the English language; abbreviated speech is not a stranger to the world in the slightest. Texting has only broadened the opportunities for linguistic creativity and expression. He insists that “we will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English” (Crystal 345) due to the growing
He explains that texting is not restricted to any single age and that the majority of messages sent do not fit the label given. It is understood among texters that breaking too many linguistic rules will make a message unreadable – and that very well defeats the purpose of sending the text message. So it has been found that many texters stick to what is considered proper and correct with only changes to grammatical words (Crystal 337). In fact, one study discovered that less than 20% of messages demonstrated any form of abbreviated language (Crystal 337-338). Crystal makes a point to explain that abbreviations are not anything near new and they certainly were not created with the advent of text. Abbreviations can be found as late back as 1618 with IOU (Crystal 338). He states that “English has had abbreviated words ever since it began to be written down” (Crystal 339), so it’s odd to be so critical of texters when exam, fridge, and bus are common everyday