msg 4u :-p

You know what really fascinates me? The truncated speech people use in text messaging. The only occasion I have to use it is when I send a message to Rick’s phone. He's got something like a 100 character limit, which is just enough to send off a brief passage from Glengarry Glen Ross, then giggle at the fact that it's going to cost him 15 cents to read it.

But sometimes I actually have important things to say, and I find myself using whatever abbreviations and combinations of characters I can come up with to get as much meaning across as possible with fewest words, until the message looks like it was written on Annie Wilkes' typewriter.

It's so bizarre... it's like we're regressing. The faster and better our ability to communicate, the worse our language gets and the more willing we are to sacrifice the prettiness and flow of words.

Is it only a matter of time until we turn into Coco the talking ape, just grunting and text messaging "me want 2 c yr niples" to each other?

Or is just the opposite occurring? Are we actually developing some sort of new, advanced superlanguage? With a Japanese-inspired speed and efficiency, stripped of all regional dialect and social colloquialisms, is the stunted language of the new millennium actually the beginning of a Gene Roddenberry-esque future in which adjectives and adverbs become obsolete, punctuation and capitalization don’t mean shit and all men speak equal?

I guess we’ll see.

till then ... l8r