 Texting is a scourge. At least that's what we're often told. The idea is that texting spells the death of writing and perhaps by extension the death of language. That's actually not true. And in my brief time, I want to tell you what texting really is because actually it's quite exciting. And the way to understand that is to look at the history of language in general. So, for example, Homo sapiens is probably about 200,000 years old. Language goes back at least 50,000 years, probably more. According to one estimate, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then as far as writing goes, as opposed to speaking, writing only came along at around 1107 p.m. So what that means is that what language is, is speaking. Writing is just a latecomer. It's an add-on, it's an artifice, and it's a very useful one, but it's not what language is. And the reason that I put it that way is to outline that there are two forms of language in a society which happens to develop writing, which most don't. There are about 6,000 languages, only about 100 of them are written in any real way. But if there is writing, then there are two forms of language. There's speech, and speech is loose. It's telegraphic. According to one study, most people, including the most educated people, speak in packets of about seven to 10 words at a time. Speech is casual. Then there's writing. Now the way writing works is that if you are sitting down, and you can imagine, for example, the Flintstones where people were carving, writing into a stone with a stylus, that of course is not far from the way writing was originally done. And even now, even if we're typing on a keyboard, writing is deliberate. Writing is slower. You can go back and can think about what you did, and you can correct it. It's very different. Speaking is largely unconscious. We can think about what we're saying, but generally we don't. Whereas with writing, it's much more deliberate. So you have those two different forms. So you can think of it as speech, which is casual, and then writing, which is formal. So that's where things go. So for example, nobody in ancient Rome talked casually the way Virgil and Cicero wrote, or if they did, they didn't date much. So that's the situation. But of course, and here's where the texting comes in, of course there's always bleed. And so for example, you can, you usually don't, but you can talk like writing. And so for example, imagine old fashioned speeches like William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech, or you might know the story of how the Gettysburg Address was preceded by Edward Everett speaking for what's often described as over two hours on a topic that nobody cares about, and the idea was just to listen to him talking like a book. That's something that people can do. All human societies have some form of speaking in a formal way. But if there's a such thing as talking like writing, then the question is why wouldn't there also be a kind of writing that's like talking? The only thing that was holding that back before was technology. That's hard to do on a typewriter. But now that we have these devices where you can write more quickly than anybody ever could before and have your message received immediately, we have the wherewithal to be able to write like we talk, that's what texting is, which means that really texting isn't writing at all. Texting is fingered speech. The idea of thinking of texting as bad writing is like listening to the Rolling Stones and thinking that it's bad music because there are no violas in it. We're talking about very different things. And so what that means is that texting is a brand new thing, and not only is it a good thing because it's new, because it's vibrant, because it has something called energy, but because it has a structure. There's a structure to it, and all of us who text are probably using it or at least processing it without having been taught it. In other words, texting has grammar. A couple of quick examples of what I mean. LOL means laugh out loud. That's what we all know. You can read about that even if you don't text. But the fact is it hasn't meant that for several years. You can imagine, especially if you're a fluent texter and especially if you're under a certain age, the way LOL is used. And so a typical exchange will be something along the lines of, LOL, it's raining. Yes, I have an umbrella. LOL, I'm inside the library. LOL, I know. It's been a long day. And then this goes on and on. Lots and lots of LOLs. I've noticed them in texts that I get from people under my certain age. No one guffaws that much. That's not what these LOLs mean. If you look at the LOLs from the perspective of a geeky linguist looking for structure, what the LOLs are are particles, which indicate that the speaker, so to speak, and the addressee are sharing a certain context of interpretation, i.e. you know what this nasty day is like, you know what it's like being in the library. That is a piece of grammar. It's a piece of grammar just like if any of you speak Mandarin Chinese, that little noot that you put at the end of things. If any of you have tried to master Japanese, think about what Nate meant. If any of you are black youth, how you use the word yo. All of those things are the exact same thing. That's what LOL is. So it's grammar. Or you'll also see in the same kind of text something like, LOL, I'm in the library. Hey, I'm having a party tonight. What's hey? We all know what that word means, but you'll see a lot of haze in texts that you would never use in actual speech. The hey is used when a person is changing the topic. In real life, we change the topic by patting our thighs and sighing, or looking off into the distance and saying, well, it makes you think, or something like that. You can't do those things when you're texting. So we have this hey. It's actually a piece of grammar. There are tribal languages in the world with particles that do the exact same thing. All of us are either using or at least receiving texts that have this usage of hey, we've never been taught it that way. We never will be again, but it's grammar, just like all of the rest of the language we use. Which is to say that texting is not the death of writing. Texting is fingered speech. It's a brand new way of using English. It's a brand new way of using language. And I think we should be thankful that we're here in this time phase where we can see it happening and participate in it. It really is a brave new world. Thank you. Thank you.