Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

David Crystal has once again put together one heck of a page-turner. His new book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 touches upon nearly everything that has to do with texting. Some believe texting to be a threat to the English language. Here, Crystal pours oil on troubled waters as he argues that texting could even be advantageous the youth. He reasons that teenagers first have to understand language before they can start playing with it. He dwells on the peculiarities and the distinctiveness of texting, some reasons why people do it, and some thoughts on social groups. Moreover, he focuses on the content of text messages, and he also gives a brief overview on how texting works in other languages than English. While doing so, Crystal remains scientific as he draws his conclusions based on sheer facts, but he does go into too much linguistic detail.
In sum, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 is an absolute must read for anyone who is interested in how the new media affects language.

I have been reading books by Prof Crystal since I was at university and hold him in regard. This one, I rate as "mildly interesting" and never astonishing. That is it supplies a framework and basis of fact around a set of observations and insights which I could quickly have come up with myself if forced at gunpoint to write an essay on the subject. No "wow, I hadn't thought of that" moments,and rather a lot of padding (such as international text practices).

Crystal sets up the bogeyman view that the phenomenon of texting (3 times the revenues produced as Hollywood) is ruining the use of language and then proceeds to dismantle it. But did anyone really believe that texting was a threat to literacy? The argot of texting borrows from and lends to general language just as other technologies have done, or as trade and migration do.

The ergonomic limitations of the traditional phone keypad have prompted creative shortcuts - which Crystal usefully categorizes as logograms, pictograms,rebus,initialisation,contraction and abbreviation. All of these existed before and have merely been incorporated. The telegraph, ham radio (with its Biggles like over and roger) and IM have also spawned shortcuts and indeed the telegraph required its whole new morse code. Restrictions can promote creativity - Crystal cites the discipline of the sonnet form as a parallel. The proliferation of qwerty keypads and touchscreens on mobile devices will no doubt lead to further evolution of txtspk.

The social implications of texting deserve more attention, though perhaps these go beyond the linguistician's domain. The human's marginal propensity to communicate as the cost and technological barriers come down is shocking. Whole patterns of social interaction have changed. How often is one surrounded by people happily texting or emailing in public spaces while simultaneouosly cocooned in their ipod sound systems and generally oblivious to the people actually there around them? So, we communicate more but interact less?

There are some interesting observatons: for example on how woman tend to differ from men in texting (longer, more grammatical, more emoticons, politer - am I surprised?) or why the US took longer to catch up (lack of common standards, driving are cited, though the broader availability and lower costs of alternative media may also have played a role). But, as I say, mildly interesting, hardly astonishing.

How this for a bit of reflexivity: I'm composing the initial draft of this review on a mobile phone. Admittedly, a full qwerty keyboard-toting BlackBerry and not an old school mobile, so not with the numeric keypad limitations of the usual SMS utilising device but, still, typing-one thumbed while I cling on to a tube strap on an underground carriage with my other hand does put the debate into context.

This is an interesting enough, quick read, but it lets itself down in a couple of presentational respects and also in scope.

Firstly, the title and sale. Already on reviews on this site there is a debate between those who find the book a bit dry and dusty and those who point out it is written by a linguistics professor, so you shouldn't really expect anything else. I suppose composing its title in textspeak was an obvious (if somewhat unimaginative) marketing ploy, but the cheap laugh it gets trades badly against its implied presentation as a book of limited ambition and sophistication - one of those impulse buys at the counter that will wind up on the cistern in the loo, rather than a book you'd buy for its own sake.

As it happens, this is a thoughtful and insightful book written (for the layman - I didn't find it dry in the slightest) by an academic and published by Oxford University Press. But the way OUP has elected to market may cause it to fall betwixt cup and lip.

But - assuming we are meant to treat it as a substantive entry - that leads onto some substantive reservations.

Firstly, I'm not so sure what's so distinctly interesting or permanent about SMS texting over instant messaging, email, discussion forums, blogs, twitter and the manifest other forms of electronic communication that have emerged over the last twenty years that it deserves separate treatment.

To be sure, SMS text has produced some unique artefacts, but it has borrowed more ("LOL"s, preposition abbreviations and emoticons are more prevalent in IM and forum posting) and those few artefacts that are unique (as Crystal recounts) are a function of transient technological limitations inherent in the particular format which are likely to be superseded. As data entry technique and information technology evolve (and they already have: things like predictive text, qwerty keyboards on PDAs, and forthcoming inevitabilities like voice recognition) the SMS idiom will almost certainly wane. I suspect, like the facsimile, it is destined for a short but incandescent trajectory through the communicative cosmos.

Secondly, limiting himself as he does, David Crystal is obliged, in a short book, to look at relatively uninteresting aspects of a minor medium (like texting in a foreign language - it takes him a few pages to illustrate this works much like English does - which is no more than the slightest sober reflection would suggest) at the expense of bigger topics of far more interest and relevance to the whole medium of electronic communication. The linguistic implications of non-destructive abbreviation are significant - but again, more so in the world of general electronic communication (where Larry Lessig's book Code: Version 2.0 or Doug Hofstader's I Am a Strange Loop are far more fascinating) and not SMS in particular. The fact that, almost overnight, we have converted our language by means of ASCII into a numerical code which can thus be manipulated, processed and treated is a revolutionary insight, but by limiting himself to texting where those implications amount to very little, Crystal can't really joint the debate.

Finally, Crystal's motive seems to have been to take wind out of the sails of the sorts of grumpy old men (Guardian op-ed columnists and commentators like John Humphrys) who claim (much as they and their kind have done about email, typewriters, television, immigrants, slang, hip hop, cockneys, and even the great vowel shift) that this new blight is destroying all that is precious our language. That's obviously horse-puckey: that it is evolution and not destruction isn't really news, and this isn't debate I'd bother engaging in even as a media commentator, let alone as an academic. No one takes these old curmudgeons seriously anyway.

There is enough in this book to make it worth reading through, but that won't take you long, and it probably would have been better pitched as a feature article in a Sunday paper. Where it could have taken on the Grumpies on their own turf.

Olly Buxton

An interesting take on a modern phenomenon, but there seems to be but a single strand to Crystal's argument, i.e. that the changes brought about by texting are unlikely to be any greater than those of any other linguistic shift over the years.

For all that, Crystal writes in a welcome clear and direct style which undercuts any suggestion of intellectualism and the glossary, which might have been regarded as padding for what is essentially little more than an extended essay, is a godsend for those of us finding ourselves a little behind the IT 8-ball.

To tell you the truth, the only part of this book I found truly useful is an appendix listing a significant number of English text abbreviations. Potential readers should take note of the fact that author David Crystal is a professor of linguistics, and so the focus of the book is on the changes - be they positive or negative or both - that the exponential growth in text messaging may or may not be making to language. Don't let that "the gr8 db8" subtitle fool you - there's very little in the way of debate in these pages (Crystal declares text messaging to be a good thing at the end of Chapter 1). It's a pretty boring read, to tell you the truth. I certainly don't see very many people, particularly young individuals, reading this with fascination or great interest.

I try to stay ahead of the crowd when it comes to technology, but I have resisted text messaging - and cell phones in general - for some time now. Having spent four years working at a helpdesk, I pretty much hate telephones; many is the time I've cursed the name of Alexander Graham Bell over the years. I do have a cell phone now, but it's only because my parents foisted one on me; unfortunately, they didn't add text messaging to their plan, so I've never really been able to play around with that technology. Working on a university campus, though, I'm certainly aware that the text messages are flying all around me all day long, and I want and need to learn more about the subject. I'm also aware, albeit tangentially, that the quality of student writing seems to be headed in the wrong direction in recent years, and I've been inclined to agree with those who blame that decline in part on the rise of text messaging. I really wanted to see a substantive debate on that question, but I just don't think this book delivered on its promise in that regard.

Among his reasons for writing this book, David Crystal talks about the lack of any such book bringing together all of the disparate academic studies and papers on text messaging vis-à-vis language. He definitely mined the research fields pretty thoroughly. Unfortunately, the continuous references to all these studies makes for some pretty dry reading for the non-academic. To make matters worse, I can't buy in to some of Crystal's findings and conclusions. For one thing, a lot of these studies involved comparatively small groups. With little to no information on the full scope of possible variables on these studies, I can't help but find them suspect. Even if the data were rock solid and reflected the analysis of much larger study groups, I question some of the author's conclusions, especially since he seemingly made up his mind early on that text messaging's positives outweigh its negatives.


While Crystal does provide a history of text messaging, lays out its unique qualities, and offers his analysis of who uses it and why, I wouldn't really recommend this book to anyone who just wants to learn more about text messaging in general. This is, for the most part, a dry and somewhat academic read. The chapter on text messaging in languages other than English was nothing short of an ordeal. Even if you are familiar with some of the terms in these different languages, you might want to just skip that chapter altogether.

To be sure, there are some interesting facts for readers to glean from these pages, but my feeling is that those with an interest in linguistics may be the only readers who will truly appreciate the author's efforts. The average reader may well have to grit his teeth and persevere just to make it through to the end.