As usually happens when anyone in the academy takes seriously the kinds of communication that happen outside the academy, John McWhorter’s recent TED talk on texting as a new language has prompted a storm of controversy and a rush to the barricades. On the one hand, the promoters of new expressions, code-switching, and the democratization of language; on the other, the defenders of clear, concise prose written in standard English, on which the effects of texting become clear as soon as a student writes “1000s of yrs ago” or puts three exclamation points together in an academic paper.
As a novelist and nonlinguist, I had a slightly different reaction to McWhorter’s presentation. It drove me back to fiction. “Texting is fingered speech,” McWhorter said at one point. “Now we can write the way we talk.” Thus emerges the argument for texting, not just as a handy way of…