Text messages aren’t full of abbreviations—typically less than ten percent of the words use them. [Frequency Illusion]
It would be interesting to see where this data comes from. Teens are probably a minority of texters. The older people get, I would bet the less likely they are to use abbreviations, and the less likely they are to use mostly abbreviations. If you also count business-generated text messages, it would be pretty easy to dilute the extremely heavy use of text messages by a subgroup. Also, “typically less than 10% of words use them,” is highly ambiguous; if it’s per-distinct-word rather than per-word-used, you could have 10% of words (I, you, can, later, soon, etc.) being used, say, 60% of the time.
These abbreviations aren’t a new language—they’ve been around for decades. [Recency Illusion]
This doesn’t really convince me. Yeah, the Atkins diet was invented in 1972. But you probably never heard of it until about 2002, when it actually became popular. Calling it a new diet in 2002 seems legitimate to me. The fact that some guy in the 40′s used “l8r” because he wanted a unique license plate doesn’t seem relevant to teenagers using it now texting; when people think of it as a recent phenomenon, they are thinking of its prevalence, not whether someone, somewhere used it once. I’ve seen no evidence that many texting abbreviations have been prevalent before now, even if they have been used occasionally. The other examples on the Wikipedia page make more sense; I’d be more inclined to believe they’ve been in common use for a while, but people deploring them now claim they’re a recent development.
It’s funny how many of the comments focused on these examples. I probably should have written up more about the ‘text messages’ angle; I was just using that as one example of someone referring to Zwicky’s ‘illusions’.
I’m not sure if you looked at Crystal’s blog entry I linked to above. He spells out some of the interesting bits, albeit anecdotally. Presumably, the book goes into much more detail. For example:
For every one instance of u, there are nine of you, they found.
Also, I can’t seem to find the reference at the moment, but I was recently reading a list of common abbreviations used in letter writing long before texting, like SWAK for “Sealed with a kiss”.
It would be interesting to see where this data comes from. Teens are probably a minority of texters. The older people get, I would bet the less likely they are to use abbreviations, and the less likely they are to use mostly abbreviations. If you also count business-generated text messages, it would be pretty easy to dilute the extremely heavy use of text messages by a subgroup. Also, “typically less than 10% of words use them,” is highly ambiguous; if it’s per-distinct-word rather than per-word-used, you could have 10% of words (I, you, can, later, soon, etc.) being used, say, 60% of the time.
This doesn’t really convince me. Yeah, the Atkins diet was invented in 1972. But you probably never heard of it until about 2002, when it actually became popular. Calling it a new diet in 2002 seems legitimate to me. The fact that some guy in the 40′s used “l8r” because he wanted a unique license plate doesn’t seem relevant to teenagers using it now texting; when people think of it as a recent phenomenon, they are thinking of its prevalence, not whether someone, somewhere used it once. I’ve seen no evidence that many texting abbreviations have been prevalent before now, even if they have been used occasionally. The other examples on the Wikipedia page make more sense; I’d be more inclined to believe they’ve been in common use for a while, but people deploring them now claim they’re a recent development.
It’s funny how many of the comments focused on these examples. I probably should have written up more about the ‘text messages’ angle; I was just using that as one example of someone referring to Zwicky’s ‘illusions’.
I’m not sure if you looked at Crystal’s blog entry I linked to above. He spells out some of the interesting bits, albeit anecdotally. Presumably, the book goes into much more detail. For example:
Also, I can’t seem to find the reference at the moment, but I was recently reading a list of common abbreviations used in letter writing long before texting, like SWAK for “Sealed with a kiss”.