Theme of the Week: The Evolution of Textspeak
For my blog’s first theme of the week, I will be exploring what I consider to be the biggest language phenomenon in the digital age: textspeak. If you understand the words in the title of this post or...
View Article“C u l8r”: Textspeak 101
Textspeak is the abbreviated language used in digital communication. It is formed in one of three ways: initialism, reduction, or substitution. Initialism: An acroym or abbreviation formed from the...
View ArticleDid LOL and OMG Really Make it into the OED?
As gatekeepers of language, dictionaries have been viewed as the authority on word usage for centuries – consulted for meanings, spellings, pronunciations, parts of speech, and origins. Before the 20th...
View ArticleHappy
In my last post, I discussed a few of the latest additions to the premier Oxford English Dictionary, which included a number of words emerging out of textspeak and contemporary instant discourse. This...
View ArticleColumbia University Linguist Shares Why Texting Is Exciting
I found this gem while doing some research on texting for my strategic storytelling class. The assignment at hand is to come up with a two-minute story that will persuade someone in your life to do...
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