Ras: r u ok wit dis?

“Has there ever been a linguistic phenomenon which has aroused such curiosity, suspicion, fear, confusion, antagonism, fascination, excitement, and enthusiasm, all at once?” David Crystal, in his book txting: the gr8 db8

Twitter has its lovers and haters and I-don’t-getters, but among the great pleasures of this social network is the way it lets you eavesdrop on subcultures that would ordinarily be closed. A grand side benefit is that you get to see the English language evolve in real time.

Consider the tweeting of NBA players, an avant-garde cadre in the use of new language forms. Here’s a recent tweet from 19-year-old John Wall (Twitter handle = jimmywa11), the #1 pick in the 2010 draft and the Wizards’ anointed superstar of the future:

@ bbanks16 Im back now chillin wit fam

The translation:

Wall is replying to a question from Brandon Banks, the Redskins’ rookie wide receiver who wears #16. The question was probably something mundane like “where r u?” Wall says he’s returned from a trip (the NBA rookie indoctrination camp in New York, a fact I happen to know from other sources) and he’s relaxing with his family.

Here’s a more substantive tweet from NBA superstar-on-the-rise Kevin Durant (KDthunderup) after Team USA’s win over Lithuania in a warm-up to the World Basketball Championship:

Tought start for us…better finish tho…I hate missin easy shots but ill be ok, hopefully..congrats to my bro @russwest44 he played well!!

And the translation:

Durant, a renowned scorer, started off the game missing shots he ordinarily makes and his team also played poorly, but rallied in the second half and won the game. He feels glad, however, for his friend and teammate, Russell Westbrook, who did spark the team off the bench.

The new world of English is nearly all there before us in these two tweets. Brevity is paramount, resulting in cut-off words (“tho,” “fam”); a dropping of the g in verb forms; an absence of apostrophes in contractions; and the pervasive presence of dots rather than standard punctuation marks to indicate a break in thought. You won’t see commas setting off participial phrases in NBAer tweeting. Interestingly, though, the English in these two tweets is recognizable, even intelligible, to one versed in standard English.

It’s true that I’ve seen some tweets so deep into the new language of texting that they read as nearly a foreign language. For example, this from NBA rookie Demarcus Cousins (boogiecousins):

RT @DevinEbanks3 @JMings19 um i believe i was talkin to @boogiecousins lol he kno y i said that< <~ lmao u a fool son

If anybody can provide an accurate translation of this in the comment chain below, I’ll award you a Master of Arts in Modern Languages from the University of 317am.  The onlne dictionary netlingo.com will be helpful.

Last week the BBC ran a thinkpiece on whether the Internet and texting – the made-up words, abbreviations, and shorthand grammar of text messaging – are destroying the English language as we know it. This kind of old-media thumbsucker is always fun to read. Experts on both sides get quoted and sometimes the author’s bias shows through despite her journalist’s effort at objectivity.

The two sides in the Great Language Debate have many names, but at bottom it’s always the Prescriptivists – think English teachers and self-appointed language mavens like the late William Safire or Lynne Truss, the au courant author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation – versus the Descriptivists – mostly the professional linguists who study how people use the language in practice.

Here’s John Humphrys a British broadcaster, delivering the kind of apocalyptic rant Prescriptivists favor in his 2007 article nicely titled “I h8txt:msgs; how texting is wrecking our language”:

“It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.”

Descriptivists know, however, that despite centuries of vociferous efforts by the Prescriptivists to establish proper English, the language is always being subverted from below. They understand the power of what the Roman poet and critic Horace called norma loquendi.

“The Internet is an amazing medium for languages,” David Crystal, a British professor of linguistics, told the BBC. “Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.”

People using word play to impress their peers is a fairly traditional activity, Crystal points out. “It’s like any badge of ability. If you go to a local skatepark, you see kids whose expertise is making a skateboard do wonderful things. Online you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet.”

Until re
cently I was deep in the traditionalist camp. After all, I’d been an English professor and a magazine editor who made a living knowing the “right” ways to put words together. I’d spent my life thinking that words mean something, that the comma splice is a sign of a weak education and vague thinking, and that proper usage of English is one of the few fixed pillars in a shifting universe. Previously, without thinking too much about it, I’d always classed the sort of easy abbreviations practiced by Wall, Cousins, and Durant as youthful barbarisms, atrocities committed by all those poorly schooled kids texting on cell phones. There would be no “chillin” for me – the upholder of standards – and I certainly knew the correct way to spell “though.”

But Twitter began the revolution. There’s nothing like attempting to cram a profound thought or just a lead-in to a URL into 140 characters (Twitter’s limit for each message) to make you understand the virtues of “u” over “you.”

Then I read The Lexicographer’s Dilemma by Jack Lynch, and I saw the light. Lynch traces the long wars between prescribers and the describers. The prescribers, in the end, always lose. Jonathan Swift, no less, ranted against the word “mob.” Why? It was short for the Latin mobile vulgare, an issue rather like “tho” or “congrats” or “fam” when you think about it, and perhaps objections to these shorteners will seem as quaint some day as Swift’s anti-mob fulminations do today.

Here’s the nub of Lynch’s argument: “If enough people make the same malapropism or spelling error, it eventually becomes part of the language.” For words, it’s survival of the fittest, the fittest determined by what the masses find most convenient to use. The perfectly fine old English word “brid” turned into “bird” over time. Why? Because most people found it easier to pronounce it that way.

One potential texting spin-off is that the long-lasting movement to rationalize English spelling – George Bernard Shaw was a proponent – could gain traction. Shaw would have loved “tho” and “wuz” and “wat.” He’d probably suggest “tuf” to Kevin Durant instead of a fruitless attempt to spell “tough.”

As Lynch points out, reasonable Descriptivists believe there’s a place for some cautious prescription – clarity being the overriding value, with consistency also good. Standard English is likely to remain standard for certain settings: business meetings, Ivy college interviews, letters of condolence come to mind. And be aware that if you choose to use “ain’t” in the office, you might as well stamp LOWER CLASS – NOT A CANDIDATE FOR PROMOTION on your forehead.

In the long run, though, efforts to make people say things the right way are as doomed as the levees on the Mississippi. I’ll make a 100-year bet right now: by 2110, even business communications (no matter what digital form they take) will be using “u” not “you.”