Almost 8 years ago a journalist, John Humphrys, wrote a newspaper article ranting about our language changing due to technology. The headline of this piece was named ‘I h8 txt msgs’ and was meant to mock and criticise the manner in which people use language in text messages. But a lot has changed in 8 years.

Since the article was written, various generations of smartphones have been introduced, social norms have changed and of course, our language has changed too. In 2007, people were still using phones with physical keyboards to text each other. During this time it was considered acceptable to use abbreviation in text messages as it would take multiple key presses on certain keys to type letters. In that sense, it made the use of abbreviations plausible as they would actually save people time whilst texting. However, due to the introduction of the first iPhone, the qwerty keyboard tends to be more generic and it also changed the way that people text.

This keyboard is very similar to those found in laptops and computers and allowed people to type in a more formal manner. Due to people not having to press keys in quick succession to get the result they wished for, the need for abbreviated words or phrases like ‘h8r’ (hater) or ‘brb’ (be right back) were no longer required. However, some of the abbreviations stuck and some are still used today. For example, ‘lol’ (laugh out loud) is still commonly used to express laughter.

If language is the very thing that is changing, perhaps the people who are trying to hold on to the ‘old’ language are afraid of change. These critics or ‘pedants’, as Stephen Fry calls them in his own article, are clinging onto the formality of the ‘correct’ use of language. However, there is no correct use of language, of course punctuation has specific uses and functions in order to make words come together to make ‘correct’ sentences but no particular person has actual ruled that abbreviations cannot be used in language.

Personally, I believe that it depends on the context in which you are contacting people. If you were texting a close friend, the context of the message would be much more informal so the use of ‘lol’ and ‘omw’ would be much more common. Whereas a personal statement to a Sixth Form would be much more formal.

In Humphry’s article, he mentions how the Oxford English Dictionary has ‘removed the hyphen from no fewer than 16,000 words’ and how he feels ‘betrayed by my precious OED (Oxford English Dictionary)’. To be honest, everyone likes the dictionary; it has all the vocabulary you could ever need and it is so simple and useful. But does removing a hyphen make the use of language so much more difficult? No, no it does not. This is because a hyphen is only one character and it is not a major attribute to the word; the hyphen was used to link two words together to combine their meanings. For example,