With all the new technologies changing or influencing (remixing) our language, it is creating a problem in classrooms and even in the real world. Teachers are upset that their students abbreviate simple words or use makeup words as if they were real. Employers are upset that the people they are looking to hire cannot communicate effectively. The root of this problem? Texting language.
This new form of language affects all people in society. Whether one actively engages in it or not, one sees and hears the language every day. And the constant exposure to the texting slang will ease itself into ones normal conversations/messages.
Now texting isn’t all bad, it’s just that the negative side effects are more noticeable/prominent. I’ve briefly mentioned these earlier, so I will move onto the positives. While there are positives to texting, they are often skipped over in favor of the negative. One positive is: the suggestions that some devices have. When you are texting, there may be a bar with suggested words or words that your phone predicts you are trying to type. This can be helpful because it exposes one to different words, and a wide variety too. Another positive to texting is the ingenuity that people have had to come up with the abbreviations. My neighbor back home says it always pays to be lazy, because you create change. (Or something along those lines. I’ve had to edit the story a bit.) If you think about it, ‘lol,’ ‘jk,’ ‘brb,’ and ‘lmao’ are all shortcuts to longer phrases. However, after a while they are beyond annoying and I personally don’t like it when people use them excessively.
So all in all, texting carries a negative connotation because of all the criticism by people in professional careers. The bottom line is that texting does affect people’s vocabularies, but the person determines if texting is a negative or positive. ~V
Picture credits:
Sunflowers and Riddles 