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Dr. Caroline Tagg managed to write an 80,000-word thesis on the art of text messaging. Srsly. The good news: Texts may not be dumbing us down as much as suspected. The bad news: It is now possible to get a PhD in texting.Dr. Tagg spent three-and-a-half years reading and analyzing over 11,000 text messages to come to the conclusion that people don't abbreviate as much as she suspected. According to Tagg, texting is a "playful" language that makes use of metaphors and puns. An example: "I will be there not on the dot," said somebody who was running late. Barf.
We've given the subject some thought as well, and after the jump, we've deciphered some common text messages for you.
"What r u up to?" -- "Im drunk, u wanna have sex?"
"LOL" -- "I didn't even read the last thing you wrote."
"See you soon?" -- "Glad ur so unreliable."
"Can't. Have 2 Work." -- "RuPaul's 'Drag Race' is on, you should know me better than that."
"Wish u were here. Ha ha." -- "I'm really high and listening to Pink Floyd."
What other secret messages are hiding in the world of texting? Give us your ideas in the comments section!
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Thursday 06 August
By Mike
I have to say, all those messages, are totally BULL CRAP!!!!
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Wednesday 12 August
By Nicci MacLeod
As a Linguistics graduate, I would like to take this opportunity to question your implication that Dr Tagg's research lacks any kind of intellectual significance.
Texting is a domain of language use, with its own unique set of formal and functional features. It is therefore just as worthy of academic linguistic study as any other area of language use - if not more, given that Dr Tagg's is the first of its kind. Furthermore, if you take the time to look into some of the recent work undertaken by Leicester University and members of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, I hope you will agree that there are major positive implications of Dr Tagg's work – this is from the web and relates to the Danielle Jones murder, if you Google ‘Danielle Jones’ and ‘text’ and you will find several similar reports:
“A prior case where this was used was the investigation of murder a few years ago. At the 2002 trial an alibi was broken based on the evidence that the murderer and not the victim had sent crucial messages from her phone. Text analyses revealed that the texts had not been written by the victim herself, but that they had been faked to deflect suspicion from the killer as there were a number of differences in the texting styles between the victim and murderer. Linguistic analysis is therefore a useful tool which can reveal secrets within the criminal investigation, which otherwise would not be apparent. This present study aims to develop the technique further by investigating text language and style.”
I hope this encourages you to re-evaluate the significance and applicability of Dr Tagg's research, and perhaps even to congratulate her on her success.
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