Perhaps, you’ve noticed it — SMART telecom’s new advert exhorting everyone to spell correctly. I have far too many gripes against SMART but, this time, I am writing to congratulate the telecom giant. About time it paid attention to what the SMS culture has done to this generation’s ability to spell correctly.
The TV advert shows a group of friends playing SCRABBLE. One of them spells out S-U-M-T-Y-M-Z then jumps with glee thinking that he just pulled a scoring coup. Then, the written message appears — spell correctly. The presentation is simple but the message is unmistakable.
I don’t know who it was that started the trend of spelling words by removing the vowels. Some say it is a spillover from chatroom lingo where “how r u?” has long been acceptable and understood exactly as “how are you?”
But the “why” always puzzled me. Within a year or two after the first digital handsets came out, they already had this feature called “predictive text” — a feature that cannot be found in any chatroom or instant messaging service. So, if it was a question of not knowing the correct spelling of certain English words, well, there was predictive text. I mean, that wouldn’t be too surprising — English is not our first language and spelling some English words can be tricky.
But for those who text in Filipino… gee, how does one make a mistake spelling Filipino words? They are spelled exactly as they are pronounced. So, what’s the point of removing the vowels, substituting numbers for letters and making all kinds of shortcuts?
Some are quick to judge that it is laziness. Or stupidity. Or a combination of both. I don’t know which is it; I only know that when used to excess, the text lingo irritates me endlessly.
When my own daughter, now 14, started sending text messages with those incomprehensible words, I panicked. Was it a sign of regressive learning? Would she start writing her schoolwork in such a manner? So I nagged her. Mercilessly. But she just went on doing it. To her credit, and to my relief, for the past two years, one of the best moments of the Parent-Teacher Conferences that my husband and I attended was listening to her teachers describe how wonderfully she wrote. Her essays, her analytical and critical thinking, were excellent. In short, her use of the text lingo wasn’t a sign of deteriorating intellectual capacity nor was it affecting her schoolwork. So, fine.
That takes me back to the question of why do the young love composing text messages in such a manner? Well, it finally hit me. It’s a generation thing, of course. The GenX is making its own statement and asserting its uniqueness by breaking every rule in phonetics and spelling with its own language as exemplified in the chatroom, IM and SMS. It isn’t much different from what acid was to the 60′s generation, disco in the 70′s or the big hairdos and padded shoulders of the 80′s. The screwed spelling is part of the fashion and social statement of the youth of the new millenium.
But what about the not-so-young who compose their text messages using the GenX’s style? I don’t know. Maybe, it’s their way of feeling “in” and young and cool.
Hi Sassy, an article entitled "c d b…" or something like it appeared in the Reader's Digest sometime in the 1980's if I'm not mistaken. That's the first time I read letters, representing similar sounding words,used in a sentence instead of whole words.
"c d b" stood for " See the bee.."
1980's? wow that long ago, eh? that debunks the "it came from chat" theory cause there was no internet back then i think.
Maybe it is some kind of "laziness". It's faster to use the "text language" to send out SMS because it takes lesser time to input all those letters (using just one hand, of course, unlike with the QWERTY keyboard). On my part, it's more practical that way. But users of text language also have the responsibility to use proper spelling and other grammar rules outside the text world. This responsibility is, what I think, the younger people doesn't understand quite or they just don't place much importance on it yet.
Ahh sas, the money they will make when text sizes start to double hehe.
While the gesture might be noble, I think hidden in that advert is a way to squeeze more pesos out of the already huge cash cow that is texting.
I think the shortened words and scandalized sentences are a result of people trying to fit everything they want to say in 144 characters hehe. It just evolved into a whole new way of speaking…I remember when I was really deep into texting, I would use my keyboard and type and find myself actually using the shortened words. Argh.
As I recall, this is due to economics. Each text message cost 1 peso and is limited to 160 characters only. 1 peso may be worth nothing to you, but it is worth a lot for those who regularly loads 10 or 30 pesos at a time.
And not only is predictive text unavailable for filipino, but tagalog words are simply too long to text-type. What annoys me though is those who like to replace "ko" with "me" or "q". Makes me cringe.
Naaah…the celtelcos already have those idiots in their pockets (How I wish I had a junk text folder in my celfone. Life would be so much sweeter. *FLUSH!*), they're trying to dip into the pockets of those who aren't stupid enough to send forwards on a daily basis, but can be fooled into spelling correctly. Imagine, if an extra text is required to convey a correctly spelled message, multiplied by even 100,000 users a day, wow. That's not an unrealistic number too.
Hehe, I remember when I first learned texting (that was 8 years ago, borrowing my classmates\' phone… it\'s been that long!), I would type up messages properly spelled and, upon reaching the 160 char limit, I\'d go back through the letters knocking out the vowels just to be able to complete the sentence. That was when Globe was just starting the 1-peso-per-text thing. Naabutan ko pa yung 250 pesos for 3 months of unlimited text… but I digress.
I don\'t think chatting was directly involved with the proliferation of txtspelling. Back when I was chatting in IRC it was always about acronyms, not abbreviations. BRB was be right back, LOL was laugh out loud, BBL, AFK, ROTFLMAO, WB, etc. Only when SMS came into the picture did chatrooms get flooded with intentionally misspelled words. We would often chide chatters doing that, saying \"di ko lam meron na palang IRC over SMS!\" I\'d say the same thing in forumboards like PEx.
I\'ve always thought that txtspelling was always an issue about speed. People have the urge to converse and reply as fast as possible, and they think that reducing the letters will contribute to that effort. On my part, pride ko na lang — I\'ve been a touch-typist since I was 11 years old, I\'ve got an above 70 wpm rate last time I checked, and on a phone with a good keypad I could text faster than average as well.
It came from civilian broadcast (CB) radios
CDB, ICQ, even the term EB came from there.