By BILL SHERMAN Staff Writer on Mar 14, 2013, at 5:16 PM Updated on 3/14 at 5:16 PM
BECAUSE I SAID SO
Another marriage counselor weighed in on the blog I ran a couple weeks ago quoting Mort Fertel, adding a valuable insight ...
A Tulsa marriage counselor took issue with my latest blog quoting Mort Fertel, who said, among other things, that marriage ...
Couples whose marriages are in trouble typically seek advice from friends, family and counselors, but much of that advice ...
I sometimes groan when I see young people’s language shortcuts adopted to accommodate the digital age; words and whole sentences abbreviated to the point of absurdity, gross misspellings, missing verbs.
I have wondered how these young people will survive in world desperately in need of clear communication to solve a myriad of growing problems.
Not to worry, says Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter.
Texting, with its abbreviations and novel usages is a “linguistic miracle happening right under our noses,” McWhorter said in a recent speech in California.
“A whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as batting around when they’re using their little devices.” he said.
“Textspeak,” he said, contains structural features of an emerging language. LOL, for example, no longer just means “laughing out loud,” but has become a much more subtle marker of accommodation, used to fill gaps in conversation, technically called a “pragmatic particle.”
As digital language develops, and young people develop the skill to move seamlessly between the language of texting and the language of everyone else, that’s a good thing, he says. Everyone knows it’s good for the brain to be bilingual.
Bet you didn’t know your kids were becoming proficient at a second language. If you’d like to keep up with them, you might try googling textspeak. You’ll find dictionaries of digital abbreviations in common use. But I warn you, some of these lists have 2,000 entries. And I suspect they come and go so fast you’ll never catch up. LOL.
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