Text talk.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Language Revolution - Brief Article

"My SMMR hols wr CWOT," a 13-year-old Scottish student wrote recently in a school essay. "B4 we usd 2g02 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr3: -kds FTF.ILNY, it's a gr8 plc." According to the British newspaper The Telegraph, the rest of the assigned paper read the same way.

"I could not believe what I was seeing," the child's teacher told the newspaper. "The page was riddled with hieroglyphics, many of which I simply could not translate."

That's because the teacher was illiterate in the language of cell phone text messaging, which her idiot student had chosen to use for her paper. The Telegraph supplied a "translation": "My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York. It's a great place." The girl's excuse for eschewing standard English: Texting was "easier."

Apparently, the same kind of texting has been turning up on Scotland's standardized English exams lately, which enabled the London-based Telegraph to alarm its readers with a...