Why texters aren't trying to hinder the language; and may be trying to help it

Louis Menand, one of my favourite writers and the person who most instigated my interest in American studies with his collection of essays of the same name, has a piece in last week's New Yorker, on the effects of texting on English, and on language in general. It is nominally a review of, Northern-Ireland-born, David Crystal's book "Txtng: the Gr8 Db8," but, since it is the New Yorker, it really uses the book as more of a jumping off point into the issue in its own right. I think it's a really nice treatment of the topic but, as an apparently avid texter (I recently had to up my plan to 1000 texts a month) there were a few things that came to mind in response to the article on how we ought to think about texting.

Crystal is a linguist and his book is an attempt to challenge the commonly made assertion that the advent of the texting in the world will lead to the degradation of English. Menand notes Crystal's field and goes on to note that experts in this field "almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad." I'm no linguist myself, and I have never even taken a class in the area but I, too, have noticed this tendency--mostly as a result of my frequenting this blog. Menand seems to disagree with this broad notion that language change cannot be bad and I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that we should attempt to retain legitimate value judgments wherever appropriate, but I don't share his mild dismissiveness.

Firstly, we should note that Crystal, according to wikipedia (source of sources), believes that language change can indeed be bad and thus proposes a standard form of the language to ensure mutual intelligibility among speakers with increasingly divergent dialects. This mutes the charge a little by, seemingly, placing Crystal in the class of linguists who are open to the possibility of unhelpful (and we may as well call this bad, or, at least, potentially so) language change in general but who just happens to believe that this particular case of language change is not one of them.

Secondly, it seems like we ought to separate out two kinds of analysis of language change, in a tried-and-tested philosophical move: the descriptive--what it is that is happening--from the normative--what it is that is of value in these events. We might say that, yes, language change as a matter of descriptive fact is indeed taking place but that from a normative perspective we could be silent on the virtues of such a change--the issues are separate. Menand asserts that professional linguists are always of the mindset that no matter the descriptive change in language there can be no negative normative connotation to this. I tend to believe that some changes in language can be negative (or at least sub-optimal) but Crystal here seems to be arguing--and I repeat that I have not read his book--that even on a descriptive level the language change that we can attribute to texting is either negligible or nothing new. Now, it's possible for us to believe that no descriptive change could be associated with a change in normative standing, i.e. we think something ought to change, like the current administration, say, and if it doesn't, we disapprove. But it seems that the case of texting cannot be held to be like this since people, in general, think we should leave the language alone because its current normative standing is just fine, thank you.

There seems to be to a meta-point here to be made about alarmism and anti-alarmism. I have long lamented the fact that people single out historical phenomena as being much more novel or significant than a survey of the past will actually demonstrate. People who make this kind of mistakes strike me as alarmists in that they warn us of a fallen present without noting, or even knowing, that the past was no better and potentially worse--they lack perspective as it were. I suppose I typically take on the role of the anti-alarmist in discussions of this nature in that I propose that a historical analysis of a given situation will mitigate the severity of their alarmism and lead them to conclude that things aren't really as bad as they seem. I certainly play this role, though, of course, amateurishly, as with everything I do, when discussing language change but I don't want to argue, in general, for the notion that there is truly nothing new under the sun. I am willing to call President Bush the worst President in American history and I think that historical perspective here will prove the alarmist case rather than the anti-alarmist one. So, in essence, we are attempting to establish where to sensibly place the burden of proof, or the direction of presumption, in different issues. In general, I think we ought to presume that the present is surprisingly similar to the past and so anytime we think that it's not we should check ourselves. But this doesn't rule out the possibility that sometimes the facts will overcome this presumption and we ultimately end up making an alarmist case--climate change, for example.

Menand makes this interesting historically comparison between texting and morse code with the clever observation that to produce an 's' in morse code takes only three presses of a device (whereas, one presumes, he is implicitly noting that to produce an 's' on a cell phone takes four). Presumably he doesn't mean this objection to be taken seriously since not only is comparing the presses necessary to produce a single character an example of the sin of cherry-picking but with the advent, quite a while ago, of predictive texting even the 's'-argument ceases to hold true. The gesture is supposed to suggest just how absurd texting can seem to be from a particular perspective: a device that affords you the opportunity to use the speediest form of communication available to us--our voices--is instead used to much less efficient ends. This is a common argument that one will hear amongst non- or anti-texters: why don't you just call them?

Now I don't know what the consensus is on what texting was supposed to be for. I can't speak to the origins of texting or to its design purpose but I can speak to how I, and I think people I know, conceive of it as a means of communication. In my experience it has proven to be most useful in providing an avenue for frequent, low-intensity contact between people who have no problem with the intimacy of phone-conversations (as Menand at one point suggests is the real source of technological developments of these kinds) but who are constrained by some factors that prevent calling at given times. So, I don't text instead of calling because I dislike calling in general, indeed I think that calling is superior to texting as a means of actually conducting a conversation, but a large number of our communicative acts aren't intended to engage in the unpredictable back-and-forth of authentic dialogue. They are strictly informative. This trend in online instant messaging, for example, has often been lamented by me because I think that text-based communication can provide a level of intellectual depth that purely voice-based communication does not but it seems perfectly acceptable given the dexterous constraints that the cell phone places on our typing abilities. Some of us may get more used to it than others but it's certainly not a pleasant physical activity.

One of Crystal's arguments is that texting is enjoyable in its own right because we enjoy playing with language and limiting ourselves to 160 characters is, in a sense, comparable to poetic constraints that we might utilise. I think this is an interesting argument and one that I have thought about to some extent, but I suspect that these kinds of constraints simply reduce the complexity of the messages sent rather than retaining complexity but altering its form. Rather I think the constraints that text messaging is concerned with are temporal not syntactical. We text because social conventions and the like forbid us from engaging in the contact we ultimately prefer to engage in.

Yes, some people text because it's less personal, sure but I don't think this captures the sole essence of the matter. We text when we want to communicate something succinct but not engage in a conversation around that information and we text when we want to communicate but are constrained in how we can do so. Menand seems to romanticise the notion of conversation as one that should be engaged in either purely or not at all. Let's say he's right, and I don't think he is, then surely text messages allow us to keep conversation pure by riding it of a whole class of trivial conversations about where people are planning to meet and when. Menand suggests that a trillion text messages sent annually cannot have no effect--presumably because a trillion of anything is too large to have no effect (angels on the head of a pin?)--on the nature of our language and maybe he's right. But I suspect that there's as much chance that texting can improve how we communicate as there is it will damage it. And, after all, isn't English really only a proxy for communication anyway?

Let's not fetishise the descriptive aspect of language change and instead remember the real standard with which a language should be compared: its ability to facilitate information exchange of a variety of types in a variety of fashions. Some trends in language change may be bad, but I don't think this is one of them.

No improvement in professionalism

So I continue to be as erratic as John McCain in posting to this blog, but I refuse to give up.

I have been writing though over the past two months or so please don't judge me too harshly (bonus: here's the link to my first column I wrote for the CT over the summer but couldn't find--for some reason--the last time I posted). The editorial board position has certainly encouraged me to write on a regular basis and I think that this has, in part, disrupted my blogging. It has enabled me to be regularly published though and, for the most part, without changes being done to my work. One of my editorials did not run, however, for reasons that were never really made clear to me, so I suppose I'll make a blog post out of that too.

A downside that I've encountered is the comments that some of my editorials produce. I've been meaning to write a piece on the typical problem with this, as I see it, though I'm sure to do so on the editorial page would only exacerbate the problem, but haven't yet gotten around to it yet.

In a sense, I feel the problem is related to the kind of difficulty I have with evaluating the back-and-forth that we witnessed, to some extent, in tonight's final Presidential debate and to a lesser extent in the others. When people write comments online they do usually so very uncarefully. And by uncarefully I mean that they write things which are ambiguous as to the logic actually used to derive them and only tangentially related to the argument I actually made. Thus I'm left in the situation of either ignoring them and feeling like a dismissive elitist or having to write a tremendous amount to be sufficiently charitable so that I don't misinterpret their terse text and feeling like I'm wasting my time. I usually opt for the former option because, firstly, I suspect it would be inappropriate to engage the commenters in that forum (no quite sock puppetry, but still) and secondly, it would require another article to really be fair to the commenter, given the way that they commented. To do otherwise would be to assume too much about their logic or about their actual position vis-a-vis my article. Part of me thinks that I should just view their responses as mere replies to the gestalt of my pieces rather than arguments with the details therein. This is frustrating but I don't really see an alternative.

I feel like the Presidential debates are similar. Both candidates, though I honestly, if biasedly, believe that McCain is more guilty of this than Obama, say things that cannot be sensibly rebutted in a convincing fashion given the time constraints. I feel like the commenters do the same. They make assertions rather than arguments and so one can either, ignore which looks cowardly, counter-assert which looks weak or counter-argue which takes time and is actually frowned upon by the moderator in a lot of cases. This shows a failure to respect the norm of conversational reciprocity.

Last night's debate was certainly more confrontational--perhaps solely because it more closely resembled in its design the way people actually talk to each other--but I don't know that it really got to the bottom of anything. The CT editorial board ran an editorial (that I didn't write) lamenting this fact and I feel the same up to a point. However, I feel like debates just cannot cover the amount of ground that the moderator wants to cover while retaining the depth that is necessitated both by objective criteria that demand that we actually investigate matters of this importance to a sufficient degree and by the way they talk to each other. So I'm sure the candidates don't help but the format, even when the format is as different as it was last night, strikes me as being mostly to blame.

Talking to each other about deep issues is surprisingly difficult. One major reason is the conflict between emotions and reasons, but this is unsurprising. Another, more complex, reason is that many debates are over details and if we don't all have the same understanding of those facts then our conversation will stall. Now, ideally we could "look up" the facts and then proceed but we know that this doesn't often happen both because we're seldom so committed to the process so as to protract it this way and because the facts are often murky enough--or, at least, seem so these days--that we can even disagree over them if we were to look them up. I'm not usually so pessimistic but I think conversation and debate both require a discipline that we're not always willing to employ--it doesn't come naturally anymore, if it ever did, and so we'll need to work hard to regain this particular virtue.