Proper Texting Etiquette

Ian Friedman
Sigma Phi Epsilon

The age of technology is in our midst, and not the kind that our parents had a hard time dealing with 10 years ago. The technology currently ravaging the info-sphere in this day and age can process more information faster for cheaper, and has reached an immensity that the human mind has a hard time comprehending.

That’s not to say that the content that travels these virtual info-lines has changed much. In fact, people are still behaving with one another in ways that hark back to their origins millennia ago in the fertile crescent.

The form with which we communicate has inevitably changed however.  It’s not that what we say has changed over the years, but the way in which we say it certainly has.  This applies to a select few media. Emails, for instance, have been and continue to be a very formal medium for communicating usually reserved for the business facet of most people’s lives. Texting, on the other hand, has achieved a level of complexity that would have been unheralded a decade ago, mainly because it would’ve been viewed as incomprehensible slang.

Yet in a way, that’s what texting has become in this era to the untrained eye. Well I’m here to tell you the ins and outs of texting and what it that thing that chick texted you last night really meant.

For starters, it’s a prerequisite that you either begin or end your text with some variation of the acronym LOL. Haha, baha, ROFL, and lolz are all good examples. Aside from signaling to your recipient that you thought what he or she just communicated to you was indeed funny, it also serves a self-effacement purpose ie. that you are laughing at yourself/what you have just texted. Why the prereq? Because seemingly every person nowadays wholeheartedly believes that what he or she has said merits some comedic response, so it’s adamant that they get the point across.

Because texting negates the entire facet of speech known as tone, it’s often important to remember all those extra vowels in your words to make sure the person you’re sending a text to knows which word you’re putting an emphasis on. The longer you make a string of the same vowel, the more important that word becomes. This is doubly true if you add an exclamation point at the end of every text. That way everyone knows that everything you’re trying to communicate is of the utmost importance.

In spite of the fact that most phones contain a spell check system, many texters opt to shorten or abbreviate words, often misspelling them in the process. Not to worry. This may have been a problem more than a decade ago when maintaining our dominant position in the world as Americans was a priority, but as we find ourselves slowly coming to terms with the fact that America is not as great as it once used to be, the moral and social obligations of spelling things correctly has decreased (also our literacy). So chances are if you text a friend “yo doooood, wutchu dern tn? hittin ^ dt????” because you want to see what his plans are for the evening, he will understand what it is that you’ve sent him completely.

Unfortunately, all the intricacies of modern textology cannot be confined into a single lowly newspaper article, but I am running out of time and patience in cataloging them all. So until next time my friends, “hav a goooood1!” ASGF           

Ian is a junior studying English and pre-medicine. You may contact him at ian.friedman90@yahoo.com.