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The Merciless Grammarian Fall 2008 / Columns

The Merciless Grammarian spews his wrath on nasty problems of grammar, mechanics, and style.

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Drawing by Nathan Baran O Merciless One: I am continually annoyed by my students’ sending text messages to each other.

They bandy about these abbreviations so much (LOL! GTG!). Is text-messaging ruining the English language? More importantly, is it ruining my students’ writing?

BFF, Adly Vespa Ah, Adly, first of all let me commend you on your articulate prose. Most of the ingrates who litter my doorstep with their missives often practice the very infractions against which they preach. “Bandy.” Bon mot, my friend, bon mot!

And the possessive before the gerund–choice! However, I arch my eyebrow at your closing BFF. Is that irony, dear Adly?

While my own lair is decidedly luddite in its orientation (I just prevailed upon my scribes to stop using papyrus), I greet your concerns with a certain amount of detached amusement. (I also include some hyperlinks below to “get jiggy with it,” as the kids say nowadays.) It seems that stories about the death of English at the hands of text-messaging and IM lingo often come from the popular press, as in this article from USA Today. More careful, academically informed writers, on the other hand, tell panicking oldsters, in effect, to calm down and have some soup.

For one thing, we need to distinguish one particular practice–using abbreviated

words in short electronic messages–from the English language as a whole. Our common tongue is much more than writing. Most people speak it much more than they write, for one thing, and even in writing we must recognize that language is not only about words, but also about sounds, inflections, syntax, and the various pragmatic ends that speaking or writing accomplish. Just because a teen types NBD, for example, to register her calm acceptance of a fact does not mean that she will suddenly start placing subjects at the end of sentences.

Some anecdotal reports may lament the middle-schooler who turns in a book report rife with text-message abbreviations or the college student writing at the typical witching hour who in moment of sleep deprivation starts dropping vowels. I put it to you, though, does not growing up in a media-rich culture also make users aware how we communicate affects what we communicate? And how much consciousness-raising does it require to point out to students that a different context and purpose require a different form of writing?

The teacher who simply wrings his ink-stained hands at the kerfuffle and is irked at having to show his students the straight and glorious way to academic writing is akin, I would argue, to the biologist who complains that freshmen just don’t get gel phosphoresis. A teacher’s job, I would argue perhaps controversially, is to teach. The response to a void should be to fill it.

I herewith dismount my soapbox to return to my nefarious schemes.

L8R, He Without Mercy ‹ SoCal Writing Centers Association 2009 Conference

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