Language Log

A little while back, a representative of the publishers of the third edition of Paul Dickson's Baseball Dictionary wrote to offer me a free copy, in the hope that I would review the book on Language Log. I replied that I was an idiot about baseball — yes, I know, this totally undercuts any claim I might have to being a real American man, but I coped with that long ago — and so was not the person they wanted to take on this task.

But I did buy the book, because I knew that Dickson's dictionary was a work of serious lexicographic scholarship (with careful citations and thoughtful definitions, the sort of thing that could be accommodated in a revision of the OED). Many specialized dictionaries are not like this, and for good reason: in many domains, the evidence for usages in written texts is very hard to come by, and very spotty.

In my capacity as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, I recently had the opportunity to interview David Crystal about his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, a careful demolition of the myths surrounding text messaging. You can read the first part of my interview on the Visual Thesaurus website here, with parts two and three to follow in coming weeks. As Mark Liberman has noted, texting is only now achieving levels of popularity in the US that Europe and parts of Asia saw about five years ago. That also means that the US is also about five years behind the curve on the concomitant hysteria over how texting presages the death of the language.

Time and time again we've seen this strain of "hell in a handbasket" degenerationism pervading attitudes about contemporary language use (e.g., here, here, here, and here). But the furore over texting in the United Kingdom, which Crystal says began with a 2003 Internet myth about a school essay written entirely in textisms, takes this alarmism to new levels. Will the U.S. be whipped up into the same fervor, five years later? Geoff Nunberg gave some indications of this possibility in a "Fresh Air" commentary a few months ago about excessive reactions to a Pew Research Center study on texting. The publication of Crystal's book in the US is therefore remarkably well-timed, since it can serve as a useful antidote to this sort of overheated discourse.