I overheard a conversation between 2 young girls yesterday:
1st girl: I tex you this morning. Did you get it?
2nd girl: Yeah, and I tex you right back.
That's right. It is now universally accepted in Britain that "Tex" has supplanted "text", presumably because it is easier to say. I wouldn't be surprised if this is soon recognised by dictionaries, which characteristically lag several years behind real spoken language on the ground. In much the same way I notice nearly everyone, sports commentators included, use "sickth", in favour of the the annoyingly difficult-to-enunciate "sixth". Soon we won't even say "six" any more, but "sick".
Don't get me wrong. I'm not deploring these changes, which represent a genuine example of the evolution of language, just chronicling them. I'm not one those dinosaurs lamenting the appalling pass our language has come to. English hasn't been a static language since Anglo-Saxon somehow got conflated with Celtic dialects and Latin and got to the early English the Venerable Bede spoke and wrote when he created "The Eclesiastical History of the English Peoples".
English changes over time as all languages do, which is why when we hear early or middle English spoken now it sounds so strange. There are sort of echos of modern English in it, but it's like listening to a drunken Geordie. And that needs sub titles, in any one's lingua franca.
Thursday, 14 June 2012
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