Mobile Phone Offer

Chinese philosopher Confucius once said:

Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.

Lucky he wasn’t a product of the mobile phone era, because perhaps it would have looked something more like this:

evrtng hz itz bUtE bt not evry1 cz it.

Shorter, yes, but far less sweet than the original version!

With the advent of mobile phones UK, and indeed the world-over, language has rapidly taken on a distinct new format – that of the abbreviated txt. Just like the slang of internet chatrooms, SMS language has evolved due to the need for speed in creating a succinct message of 160 characters or less. In SMS language, punctuation and grammar is ignored, and emoticons commonplace. Like journalistic shorthand, vowels are often ignored, and frequently used terms become acronyms.

But what happens when language of mobile phones ventures out into the wider community?

Just think of the literary possibilities! Shakespeare’s Hamlet would be pondering “2b/-2b=?”, or Beckett’s work rendered all the more absurd as w8ing 4 go (Waiting for Godot). A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, could start with “twz d bst of x, twz d wst of x” (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...”) and Tolstoy’s chunky epic, War and Peace, would be a mere pamphlet to slip in your pocket – which would make convenient reading on the way home from work!

But while the now ubiquitous mobile phone offers a creative new take on language, it also involves a large and versatile approach to lateral interpretation. I mean, what do you do when you have a friend who is a chronic txt-er, but you don’t understand their abbreviations? My recommendation to everyone out there – if it’s possibly ambiguous, just use predictor text! It would make life a lot simpler for everyone!

To anyone mortally horrified out there at the txt desecration of language, don’t worry. It’s all fashion and fad, and part of the natural evolution of language. Just appreciate the whole mobile phone deal for what it is, enjoy it, have a laugh – and have a go at amusing and bamboozling your friends and family too! Remember, everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it!