Txt me Ishmael

Text messaging is not just for kids, David Crystal will tell you. He's written a piece for the Guardian that compares the constraints of texting — only 160 characters, in awkward cellphone configurations — to those of writing haikus or sonnets. Arbitrary limits of form can lead to some genuine creativity, he says (although he does have some critiques).

The creative truncation of language has a long history — IOU, for example, dates back to 1618. Ultimately, Crystal, whose book "txting: the gr8 db8" is coming to the United States in September, thinks that "txt msging" bodes well for the future:

"Some people dislike texting. Some are bemused by it. But it is merely the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings. There is no disaster pending. We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English. The language as a whole will not decline. In texting what we are seeing, in a small way, is language in evolution."

Japan had the jump on text message fiction — "Deep Love," stories that were self-published there in the mid-oughts, are often cited as an early popularization of long-form stories delivered in short text bursts. Since then, there have been many efforts to write prose in 160-character doses.

Today, writer Matt Richtel is among the authors using Twitter, which limits its post to 160 characters, just like text messages, and can be delivered to cellphones or viewed online. He's writing a thriller — cliffhanger after cliffhanger — in connection with his new book, "Hooked." The bookish TwitterLit provides just the first lines of books, such as "The year began with lunch." Interested parties who click through end up on the Amazon page for the book that follows — in this case, it's Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence." And DailyLit is using Twitter to send novels in tiny chunks to interested readers, then encouraging book group discussions.

I'm not sure how anyone has time for all this texty reading, but, like Crystal, I see promise in the evolution.

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of a txt-heavy MIT graduation by dbdbrobot via Flickr.