It seems there are few things the media relish more than a moral panic. Those who follow the news cannot fail to have noticed that in recent years, one of these panics has been underway over the question of texting, and in particular whether it has a negative effect on children’s literacy. Concerns have been expressed that young people have become so accustomed to the abbreviated forms used in text messages that they have become incapable of writing correct English (or French or Japanese or whatever their native language may be). There have been stories about students peppering their written work with textese, or even writing essays entirely in textspeak, although no authentic examples of the latter have ever been identified. This is the ‘great debate’ of the subtitle to David Crystal’s examination of text-messaging and the issues it has raised, Txting: The Gr8 Db8. The book carries on its back cover two examples of the negative judgements that have featured in discussions of texting in British newspapers, one of which compares its effects on language to that of Genghis Khan on his neighbours! Such hyperbole has not been untypical of the debate.

You can rely on David Crystal to take a cool, calm and evidence-based approach to questions of language use, and that is exactly what he does here. Intrigued by the number of communications he was receiving on the subject of text-messaging and its effects on language, Professor Crystal decided to look behind the screaming headlines and the apocalyptic pronouncements of commentators, and try to establish what kind of linguistic animal texting is, what its astonishing rise in popularity signifies, and what effects it is actually having on language use in general and the literacy of young people in particular. As with his book on punctuation, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left, the author takes a reasoned look at the evidence, as well as the debate itself, and concludes that there is no need to panic just yet.

The book starts with an account of the texting phenomenon and its astonishing rise in popularity: it has been estimated that 2.4 trillion (billion billion) text messages will be sent worldwide in the course of 2010. It goes on to analyse the linguistic features of texting in a number of different languages and to examine the evidence for a negative effect of this on the literacy of young people. The author concludes that, while there is some danger that some young people will use textese inappropriately in their writing, this problem should be tackled as part of the general process of teaching writing, rather than by damning texting for reducing literacy skills. Indeed, he points out that texting itself requires considerable literacy skills, since in order to master the abbreviations used in texting you need to have first mastered the language that is being abbreviated. The book also contains is a glossary of terms from mobile phone technology and linguistics, and a fascinating appendix giving texting terms in eleven languages other than English.

Also on the topic of the language used by young people is Lucy Tobin’s Pimp Your Vocab. This is billed as ‘A Terrifying Dictionary for Adults: Words Kids Don’t Want You To Know’. Behind the hype, it is a not-too-serious look at teenage slang from A and B the C of D (which apparently means ‘above and beyond the call of duty’ and which I have to admit I have never heard any teenager use) to Zonino (meaning ‘woohoo!’). Some entries, as confirmed by my own teenager, are spot on – wagwan is indeed a popular greeting here in Birmingham and bare really does mean ‘lots of’. As with any such collection, some familiar terms are omitted: cool beans is in there, for example, but chill your (yo) beans isn’t; there is an entry for moobs but none for cankles. And, as with any attempt to pin down slang, the language itself will already have moved on, rendering some of the terms obsolete, at least among teenagers.

The entries are illustrated by examples of use, which I have to say, to my eye look as though they have been made up by the author. Each entry also includes a guide to pronunciation which claims to be phonetic but actually seems to bear little relation to how the items are actually pronounced. This book makes for an entertaining read and will doubtless have found its way into many stockings this Christmas, but at £7.99 for 120 small pages of not-very-dense text it is poor value compared to the Crystal, which for only £2 more gives you 230 pages of well-written, well-argued and, yes, entertaining discussion of an important and interesting subject.

Glossary
cool beans – an exclamation of high regard, similar to 'great' but totally obscure
chill your (yo) beans – calm down, cool it
moob – a 'man boob' – or in a more general context, a top heavy man
cankles – ankles so fat that they cannot be distinguished from the person's calves, so that the leg appears to go straight into the feet 

Txting: The Gr8 Db8
David Crystal
Oxford University Press
2008
ISBN 978-0-19-954490-5

Pimp Your Vocab
Lucy Tobin
Portico
2009
ISBN 978-1-90-603272-2

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