John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

We always hear that texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true, and it's easy to think that it is true,

but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now, we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is,

in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all. What do I mean by that? Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked. That's what we're probably genetically specified for.

That's how we use language most. Writing is something that came along much later, and as we saw in the last talk, there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m.

That's how much of a latterly thing writing is. So first there's speech, and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice. Now don't get me wrong, writing has certain advantages. When you write, because it's a conscious process, because you can look backwards, you can do things with language that are much less likely