McWhorter, John. "Txtng is killing language. JK!!!" TED. Feb. 2013. Lecture. Website: https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk#t-130463
SUMMARY
McWhorter begins by making the distinction between spoken speech vs. written speech aka text/writing. If one were to record a group of people talking; one finds language to be looser, and less reflective. That fact is more evident now but take Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and one can read that he is writing as one would speak at the time.
That is the correlation he makes to the modern text messaging slang. Technology, according to McWhorter, makes the ability to write as one speaks easier. That’s what teenage girls are doing when writing LOL. They are using a text to illustrate a real-world laughter that naturally happens in conversation. They write in short brief responses because that is what one does in spoken language. He concludes by saying that the idea of language losing its essence is history repeating itself such as when a schoolteacher in early 1900’s accuses freshman in college lacking the ability to spell. He goes back even further to 1870s when the President of Harvard accuses students in his university of, "bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing." Finally, he goes back even further to 63 CE where a man expresses his distaste for the way people are speaking a new form of Latin. That particular language was referring to what later became French.
RESPONSE
McWhorter's point is that language evolves and it is understood best in hindsight. Some people look down on text messaging, yet, is it possible this practice will be taught as an art form in the future? There are two points I wish to stress about the Ted Talk.
1. Similar to how language evolves in the real world, we are currently witnessing the evolution of dialogue in a new form; online, gifs, emojis, audio recording texts, short video clips, etc. And because language is weaved into identity, it’s worth exploring some of the connections between cybertext and identity.
2. McWhorter points out that written language is more reflective, while spoken language is looser. This is a point people have made in previous posts on the blog. Written text online, because it is written and read back, can be edited thus, identity can be edited and who we form can be reflected and edited time and time again. 'Of course' our brains edit our speech in real-world situations also but with technology evolving so rapidly; will we reach a point where the identity is so refined, and filtered that we loose elements of the person behind the avatar?
QUOTATIONS
“…texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now…”
“Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic. It's much less reflective -- very different from writing.”
“…if I could go into the future, if I could go into 2033…I'd want to know…please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls, because I would want to know where this language had developed since our times, and ideally I would then send them back to you and me now so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses.”
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