A pox on texting

THE French, for all their irritating and insufferable arrogance, do have something going for them. They like being French.

They like being French to the extent that the l’Académie Française actively eliminates such English based words as le weekend and le bulldozer, replacing them in their official dictionaries with convoluted Gallic expressions.

They are the only government in the world to run a culinary school so that they can control the quality and provenance of their national cuisine and maintain its unique “Frenchness”.

We could take a leaf out their book and mount a campaign to protect the English language. From what, you no doubt ask?

Well we need to protect it from that creeping cancer that affects the Western world and is even actively promoted by such august publications as the Geelong Ad

vertiser and many others that should know better.

This vile insidious disease is known as texting, and, to anyone over the age of 35, an explanation is due.

If you understand this sentence, “my smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 Melb 2 C my bro, his GF thr 3 dvs kids FTF. ILuvMelb, itz a gr8 plc’, then skip this article and read something else.

For everyone else it translates into: ‘My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to Melbourne to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three devious kids face to face. I love Melbourne. It’s a great place.”

Texting is a youth culture designed to confuse, avoid and destroy the English language and anyone who has finally cast the vagaries of puberty well and truly behind them.

In newspapers it is also used to confound literate people and hide behind anonymity.

For some reason it seems quite acceptable to sign a text message “Shagger”, “Cosman”, “Mean Mum” and this anonymity trait is closely allied to the culture of avoidance.

Letters to the editor always carry the person’s real name and suburb allowing the letter writer to be identified and accept responsibility for their opinion.

Not so with texting.

We have all heard of people dumping their partners by text and how many rampant texters have cancelled meetings with friends rather than phoning them up and actually talking to them?

The reason they do so is that it is less confrontational, offers no chance of interaction or inconvenient questions and is a further remove from face-to-face communication. Business people often complain that the young are poor at reading, writing and counting, and soon none will be able to express themselves with the joyful nuances and limitless variations their heritage gives them access to. With the spread of texting — 12.2 billion a year in Australia and rising — dictionaries will soon be a hundred pages shorter as all homonyms will be eliminated from definitions.

We will no longer be able to enjoy the teasing and pleasing subtleties of the English language of words such as they’re, their and there.

Palate, pallet and palette. Praise, prays and preys and wrapped, rapt and rapped will all be lost to one generic word for ease of texting.

One of my problems is that sometimes when readers send in a text message about me there’s no attempt to confuse anybody.

“Peter Moore is a silly old man” came out exactly as just that!

Why couldn’t they have confused the reader just a little with “hes jst a silE old mn”?

However, enough of my problems, of more importance is that the English language is at stake. As the French would say: “Une vérole sur les messages texte” or, as we say in good old unabbreviated English, “a pox on text

messages!”