Jack B's English Journal

Mr.Humphrys,
Reading your article on how texting is wrecking our language, it has become very clear that you are afraid of change; you do not like the Internet; you do not like how are language is changing. Your surroundings will not stay the same, neither will your lifestyle, or your world, that’s a fact and you have no control over that somethings you won’t like and others you will. So just like how your surroundings will change so will your language, but I’m afraid sir, everything will always be changing you can not avoid it.

Over the years the Internet has become used more, and more and more benefits are coming from this. Through this websites and apps are becoming multi purpose, so if I need to find a word, instead of looking through a dictionary I can simply search the word on a online dictionary. Now it is easier to stumble across new words just like having a dictionary right in front of yourself, within a click of a button you can search the meaning of your word and then change it to a thesaurus to discover new words.
The only downfall is that you don’t get the feeling and smell of good paper, but not everybody likes that anyway.
Mr.Humphry your problem with how the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) has left the hyphen out in some words of the Oxford English Dictionary. You make it seem as if there was a huge amount of change but really it’s only a tiny section of words from the dictionary. If these words contained hyphens or not, the meaning would not be affected. I believe you are picking at such little changes in this dictionary. No our time has not become so precious that we can not go out of our way to add one little hyphen, but really what is the need? It’s only a tiny problem, if it is even a problem at all. I can see where your argument is coming from, because there was a lot of changes; maybe it is for when people are texting or sending emails. This doesn’t make the people texting and emailing without adding hyphens, vandals.

Since your article in 2007, phones have been dramatically changing and almost everybody uses social media. Due to the change SMS is barely ever used, this gives people the freedom to use as many characters or words as when texting somebody. This has almost put an end to using abbreviations and spelling words with a few letters missing, people may still use some harmless abbreviations such as wuu2 (what you up to) or may cut letters out of words such as your example of thks. You will never find some one texting you IMHO (in my humble opinion), because people would know that this abbreviation is hard one to understand, so they would just type it. Since the evolution of social media and mobile phones have been able to allow better grammar when people are messaging each other. A change which I would believe you may like. Unfortunately for you there are still a growing about of emoticons that we may litter are texts with. Now if you type a semi colon and a bracket next to each other you will not have a smiley face appear, not that you would ever have to do that.