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| Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 | 
 enlarge | Author: David Crystal
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (39 reviews)
Sales Rank: 32463
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0199544905
Dewey Decimal Number: 004.692
EAN: 9780199544905
ASIN: 0199544905
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Text messaging has spread like wildfire, especially among young people, who appear to spend most of their time texting, and are unwilling to write much else. Indeed the phenomena is so widespread that many parents, teachers, and media pundits have been outspoken in their criticism of it. Does texting spell the end of western civilization?
In this humorous, level-headed and insightful book, David Crystal argues that the panic over texting is misplaced. Crystal, a world renowned linguist and prolific author on the uses and abuses of English, here looks at every aspect of the phenomenon of text-messaging and considers its effects on literacy, language, and society. He explains how texting began, how it works, who uses it, and how much it is used, and he shows how to interpret the mixture of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay typically used in texting. He looks at its manifestations in different languages, and explores the ways similar devices have been used in different eras. He finds that the texting system of conveying sounds and concepts goes back a long way--to the very origins of writing. And far from hindering children's literacy, texting turns out to help it.
Illustrated with original art by Ed MacLachlan, the popular cartoonist whose work has appeared in Punch, Private Eye, New Statesman, and many other publications, Txting: The Gr8 Db8 is entertaining and instructive--reassuring for worried parents and teachers, illuminating for teenagers, and fascinating for everyone interested in what's currently happening to language and communication.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 34 more reviews...
Interesting, fast easy read! November 17, 2008
This wasn't a subject I was extremely interested in, just curious since my texting abilities are limited. Where I found some things insightful, I could have been happily satisfied reading an article on the subject rather than a book. However, Crystal is engaging and fun to read. He's also an English author so expect to find English colloquialism. I suspect if you have a linguistics interest you'll really enjoy reading this book, ultimately I did.
In the end I found the book best summed up on page 53: "My conclusion about the language of texting is that it is neither especially novel nor especially incomprehensible. Several of the abbreviations have been taken over wholesale from other Internet activities (such as chatrooms and emails) or from earlier varieties of written language. What novelty there is lies chiefly in the way texting takes further some of the processes used in the past."
 A Linguist's Take on Texting November 15, 2008
Prolific linguist David Crystal takes on editorialists, educators and general naysayers in a spirited defense of texting. In Txting The Gr8 Db8 he explores the development of texting as an adaptive linguistic form suited to the technologies of cell phones and other handheld devices. Shorthand methods inevitably emerge to make it easier to type on miniature keyboards, some of which require four button presses for the letter "s."
Text messages may look strange to the uninitiated, but Crystal shows that in their tendency to use acronyms (such as GF for "girlfriend"), shortened words (gov, biog) , and phonetic combinations (2nite), texting is following in long established patterns of linguistic evolution. Besides, the author notes, studies of text messages show that "odd" locutions show up less frequently than one might imagine.
Texting helps make personal communication easier, more direct, and timely (it's also fun), and though there have been poetry contests based on texting most text messages are prosaic and rather utilitarian. Young students seem to know that text shorthand is not appropriate for formal essays, and there may be evidence that texting might even be helpful to those students struggling with writing.
The book contains a chapter on texting among non-English speakers, and a delightful gallery of "text abbreviations in eleven languages." This worldwide phenomenon, Crystal concludes, "is neither especially novel nor especially incomprehensible." He makes a solid case, and in the end I came to share his appreciation for a way of connecting that I, too, am using more and more.
txtng November 11, 2008
This is a clear, funny and informative book about the text messaging phenomenon. Crystal deals in facts rather than prejudices, and provides an accessible guide to what is really known about texting and its educational impact. The parts I found most interesting were the details on how texting works in languages other than English. The most important is probably the concluding chapter making the case that with good teaching, far from reducing literacy, texting is actually likely to cause school students to do more writing, reflect more on how they write, and become generally more able to use language in appropriate and flexible ways. Before writing yet
another scare story about texting, journalists and educators should read this book.
A Linguist's Calm View of a New Lingo November 5, 2008
If you don't practice text messaging, you may well be anti-text messaging. There are plenty of people who don't like text messaging, and not just people who object to kids in the theater sending and receiving messages when they ought to be paying attention to the movie and not distracting those around them. Texting is wrecking the language, these people say. It is ruining attention to spelling and punctuation, and it makes young people unable to read or write (or think) at length. It erodes communication between young texters and the teachers and adults who ought to be influencing them into responsibility. It might seem that the anti-texters would have an ally in David Crystal. He is old, for instance, with white hair and beard, and he is a professor of linguistics. He's surely one to turn to if you want to find out just how dangerous texting is to civilization as we know it. Not so fast. He titles his newest book _txtng: the gr8 db8_ (Oxford University Press) and if you are so out of it that you can't figure out that title, it is "Texting: the Great Debate". Within, you will find that Crystal loves texting. He is fascinated by it. "Texting is one of the most innovative linguistic phenomena of modern times," he writes. I myself have never sent or received a text message, but Crystal, with good humor and clear exposition, makes the subject just as interesting as he finds it himself. Anti-texters will be displeased if not reassured: Texting, Crystal frankly says, "is not a bad thing."
But what about that benighted teenager who, a few years ago, wrote a school essay, and her teacher simply could not understand what she was saying? Her essay was supposed to be on the classic theme "What I Did Last Summer", and she began, "My smmr hols wr CWOT." The translation is, "My summer holidays were a complete waste of time," and it goes along in the same way throughout. We might not expect her to write something that would rival Shakespeare, but surely this represents language decay? This girl's essay was a hoax, never submitted to that uncomprehending teacher, but instead written to excite the worries of those already worried about texting. It turns out that the scare over texting (and Crystal cites serious thinkers, not just hoaxers, who fret over the subject) is just this season's style of worrying over what those kids are up to. If you like to be informed how little people change in their worries over the centuries, Crystal has wonderful examples from previous ages of six categories of "novelty" attributed to texters, like using the shorter "coz" for "because", an abbreviation that goes back to 1828. There are some novel short forms texters use, but the styles of shortening have all been seen before. There is merely more of a push for abbreviation in this particular communication system because there is a tiny screen with a limited number of characters available in a message, plus there are something like thirteen tiny keys to use to press the message into the machine, so the fewer strokes to be made the better. Crystal does give a brief appendix listing texting abbreviations, and also gives examples from other languages, because not just English-speakers text.
Texting is a new technology, and people have to learn to use it properly. Crystal simply does not see linguistic problems arising from its use. Sure, there are complaints that writing and speaking skills have declined, but such complaints have been present for decades if not centuries. "If you have trouble with reading and writing," Crystal explains, "you are hardly going to be predisposed to use a technology which demands sophisticated abilities in reading or writing." The problems he sees with texting are social or psychological ones. It is not good that young people are having their sleep interrupted by incoming text messages, in ways that phone calls or e-mail would not so intrude. Most people think it is rude for a person with whom they are talking to break off and start texting someone; for a driver to text is not rude but downright dangerous. Naturally some young people will do texting to the exclusion of other activities, and this could be harmful, as could the repetitive stress injury to finger joints caused by hours of texting. Balance this with its social value (a private means of reporting bullying, a fun way to keep in touch with friends, a spur to social and communication skills, and more) and texting can be seen as having plenty of advantages. Linguistically, Crystal finds texting a source of creativity and fun, and certainly not the language-busting bugbear that the media have made it out to be. He makes a convincing case in an entertaining way, and if after reading his book, you still want to promote societal worries about the new lingo, I can tell you it's _nagi_. Not a good idea.
 I thought it would be interesting October 31, 2008
I thought this book would be interesting, but it turned out to be hard to get into for me. The gist of the text is "don't be so uptight, people have always used forms of shorthand and communication hasn't suffered." Unfortunately, "Txting" reads like the academic writing that it is and didn't carry me through to the end. I am sure the findings are correct and the author knowledgeable, but the dismissive tone he uses for those with concerns over the potential that young people won't know how to write properly was off-putting. This was a pop-culture book that didn't say much to me.
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