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We always hear that texting is a scourge.

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The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall

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of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability,

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among young people in the United States

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and now the whole world today.

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The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true,

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and it's easy to think that it is true,

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but in order to see it in another way,

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in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing,

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not just energetic, but a miraculous thing,

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a kind of emergent complexity

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that we're seeing happening right now,

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we have to pull the camera back for a bit

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and look at what language really is,

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in which case, one thing that we see

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is that texting is not writing at all.

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What do I mean by that?

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Basically, if we think about language,

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language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years,

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at least 80,000 years,

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and what it arose as is speech. People talked.

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That's what we're probably genetically specified for.

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That's how we use language most.

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Writing is something that came along much later,

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and as we saw in the last talk,

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there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened,

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but according to traditional estimates,

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if humanity had existed for 24 hours,

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then writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m.

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That's how much of a latterly thing writing is.

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So first there's speech, and then writing comes along

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as a kind of artifice.

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Now don't get me wrong, writing has certain advantages.

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When you write, because it's a conscious process,

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because you can look backwards,

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you can do things with language that are much less likely

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if you're just talking.

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For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon's

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"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:"

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"The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours,

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till the graduate retreat of the Persians was changed

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into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example

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was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself."

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That's beautiful, but let's face it, nobody talks that way.

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Or at least, they shouldn't if they're interested

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in reproducing. That --

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(Laughter)

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is not the way any human being speaks casually.

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Casual speech is something quite different.

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Linguists have actually shown

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that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way,

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we tend to speak in word packets of maybe

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seven to 10 words.

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You'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record

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yourself or a group of people talking.

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That's what speech is like.

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Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic.

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It's much less reflective -- very different from writing.

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So we naturally tend to think, because we see language

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written so often, that that's what language is,

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but actually what language is, is speech. They are two things.

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Now of course, as history has gone by,

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it's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed

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between speech and writing.

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So, for example, in a distant era now,

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it was common when one gave a speech

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to basically talk like writing.

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So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving

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in an old movie where they clear their throat, and they go,

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"Ahem, ladies and gentlemen," and then they speak

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in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech.

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It's formal. It uses long sentences like this Gibbon one.

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It's basically talking like you write, and so, for example,

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we're thinking so much these days about Lincoln

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because of the movie.

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The Gettysburg Address was not the main meal of that event.

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For two hours before that, Edward Everett spoke

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on a topic that, frankly, cannot engage us today

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and barely did then.

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The point of it was to listen to him

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speaking like writing.

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Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours.

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It was perfectly natural.

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That's what people did then, speaking like writing.

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Well, if you can speak like writing,

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then logically it follows that you might want to also

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sometimes write like you speak.

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The problem was just that in the material,

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mechanical sense, that was harder back in the day

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for the simple reason that materials don't lend themselves to it.

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It's almost impossible to do that with your hand

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except in shorthand, and then communication is limited.

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On a manual typewriter it was very difficult,

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and even when we had electric typewriters,

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or then computer keyboards, the fact is

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that even if you can type easily enough to keep up

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with the pace of speech, more or less, you have to have

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somebody who can receive your message quickly.

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Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message,

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then you have the conditions that allow

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that we can write like we speak.

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And that's where texting comes in.

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And so, texting is very loose in its structure.

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No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts,

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but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

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No, and so therefore why would you when you were texting?

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What texting is, despite the fact that it involves

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the brute mechanics of something that we call writing,

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is fingered speech. That's what texting is.

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Now we can write the way we talk.

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And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless

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easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline.

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We see this general bagginess of the structure,

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the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to

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learning on the blackboard, and so we think

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that something has gone wrong.

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It's a very natural sense.

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But the fact of the matter is that what is going on

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is a kind of emergent complexity.

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That's what we're seeing in this fingered speech.

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And in order to understand it, what we want to see

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is the way, in this new kind of language,

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there is new structure coming up.

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And so, for example, there is in texting a convention,

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which is LOL.

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Now LOL, we generally think of

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as meaning "laughing out loud."

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And of course, theoretically, it does,

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and if you look at older texts, then people used it

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to actually indicate laughing out loud.

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But if you text now, or if you are someone who

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is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become,

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you'll notice that LOL

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does not mean laughing out loud anymore.

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It's evolved into something that is much subtler.

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This is an actual text that was done

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by a non-male person of about 20 years old

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not too long ago.

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"I love the font you're using, btw."

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Julie: "lol thanks gmail is being slow right now"

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Now if you think about it, that's not funny.

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No one's laughing. (Laughter)

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And yet, there it is, so you assume

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there's been some kind of hiccup.

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Then Susan says "lol, I know,"

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again more guffawing than we're used to

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when you're talking about these inconveniences.

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So Julie says, "I just sent you an email."

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Susan: "lol, I see it."

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Very funny people, if that's what LOL means.

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This Julie says, "So what's up?"

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Susan: "lol, I have to write a 10 page paper."

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She's not amused. Let's think about it.

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LOL is being used in a very particular way.

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It's a marker of empathy. It's a marker of accommodation.

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We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles.

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Any spoken language that's used by real people has them.

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If you happen to speak Japanese, think about

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that little word "ne" that you use at the end of a lot of sentences.

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If you listen to the way black youth today speak,

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think about the use of the word "yo."

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Whole dissertations could be written about it,

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and probably are being written about it.

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A pragmatic particle, that's what LOL has gradually become.

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It's a way of using the language between actual people.

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Another example is "slash."

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Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to,

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along the lines of, "We're going to have

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a party-slash-networking session."

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That's kind of like what we're at.

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Slash is used in a very different way

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in texting among young people today.

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It's used to change the scene.

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So for example, this Sally person says,

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"So I need to find people to chill with"

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and Jake says, "Haha" --

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you could write a dissertation about "Haha" too, but we don't have time for that —

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"Haha so you're going by yourself? Why?"

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Sally: "For this summer program at NYU."

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Jake: "Haha. Slash I'm watching this video with suns players

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trying to shoot with one eye."

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The slash is interesting.

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I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that,

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but you notice that he's changing the topic.

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Now that seems kind of mundane,

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but think about how in real life,

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if we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic,

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there are ways of doing it gracefully.

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You don't just zip right into it.

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You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance,

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or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think --"

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when it really didn't, but what you're really --

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(Laughter) —

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what you're really trying to do is change the topic.

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You can't do that while you're texting,

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and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium.

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All spoken languages have what a linguist calls

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a new information marker -- or two, or three.

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Texting has developed one from this slash.

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So we have a whole battery of new constructions

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that are developing, and yet it's easy to think,

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well, something is still wrong.

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There's a lack of structure of some sort.

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It's not as sophisticated

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as the language of The Wall Street Journal.

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Well, the fact of the matter is,

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look at this person in 1956,

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and this is when texting doesn't exist,

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"I Love Lucy" is still on the air.

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"Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table,

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cannot write grammatically -- "

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We've heard that sort of thing before,

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not just in 1956. 1917, Connecticut schoolteacher.

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1917. This is the time when we all assume

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that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect

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because the people on "Downton Abbey" are articulate,

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or something like that.

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So, "From every college in the country goes up the cry,

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'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.'"

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And so on. You can go even further back than this.

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It's the President of Harvard. It's 1871.

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There's no electricity. People have three names.

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"Bad spelling,

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incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing."

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And he's talking about people who are otherwise

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well prepared for college studies.

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You can go even further back.

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1841, some long-lost superintendent of schools is upset

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because of what he has for a long time "noted with regret

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the almost entire neglect of the original" blah blah blah blah blah.

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Or you can go all the way back to 63 A.D. -- (Laughter) --

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and there's this poor man who doesn't like the way

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people are speaking Latin.

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As it happens, he was writing about what had become French.

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And so, there are always — (Laughter) (Applause) —

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there are always people worrying about these things

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and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning.

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And so, the way I'm thinking of texting these days is

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that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing

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that young people are developing,

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which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills,

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and that means that they're able to do two things.

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Increasing evidence is that being bilingual

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is cognitively beneficial.

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That's also true of being bidialectal.

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That's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing.

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And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act

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that young people are using today, not consciously, of course,

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but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire.

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It's very simple.

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If somebody from 1973 looked at

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what was on a dormitory message board in 1993,

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the slang would have changed a little bit

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since the era of "Love Story,"

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but they would understand what was on that message board.

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Take that person from 1993 -- not that long ago,

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this is "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" -- those people.

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Take those people and they read

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a very typical text written by a 20-year-old today.

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Often they would have no idea what half of it meant

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because a whole new language has developed

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among our young people doing something as mundane

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as what it looks like to us when they're batting around

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on their little devices.

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So in closing, if I could go into the future,

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if I could go into 2033,

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the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon

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had done a sequel to "The Wire." I would want to know.

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And — I really would ask that —

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and then I'd want to know actually what was going on on "Downton Abbey."

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That'd be the second thing.

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And then the third thing would be,

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please show me a sheaf of texts

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written by 16-year-old girls,

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because I would want to know where this language

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had developed since our times,

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and ideally I would then send them back to you and me now

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so we could examine this linguistic miracle

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happening right under our noses.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)

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Thank you. (Applause)