Book Review: Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 - Part 1

In Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, David Crystal provides a delightful descriptivist jaunt through one of the newer modes of writing: texting, text messaging, SMS, you name it.

As mentioned a few days ago here, Crystal states his thesis this way: "All the popular beliefs about texting are wrong, or at least debatable." What you may not expect from a venerable retired linguist is a defense of text messaging as a creative form of writing that, in many respects, is really not terribly unusual. He goes from detailing (and taking exception with) outcry against texting as the harbinger of death for the English language to probing the phenomenon of texting:

Chapter 1 - The hype about texting
Chapter 2 - How weird is texting?
Chapter 3 - What makes texting distinctive?
Chapter 4 - Why do they do it?
Chapter 5 - Who texts?
Chapter 6 - What do they text about?
Chapter 7 - How do other languages do it?
Chapter 8 - Why all the fuss?

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