Thursday, January 22, 2009

d2 n me...wer n u?

Like so many of us, I usually abbreviate my words when I text…but, it was only recently that I realized that I also do the same to the words in my emails. Instead of spelling the words properly, we usually resort to the phonetic spelling of the words. Who can blame us, our SMS message can only carry 163 characters, plus, typing all those letters to spell out the words would give us carpal tunnel syndrome hehe…

I sometimes spell words incorrectly, and there are times when I had to recite the " “i" before "e" except after "c" or when sounded like "a" as in neighbor or weigh; and except seize and seizure and also leisure, weird, height, and either, forfeit, and neither ” just to make sure that I got the spelling right. Texting has made me lose the ability to spell the words correctly without relying on crutches like that grade school poem.

One professor said text messaging has made us more illiterate. Instead of spelling words according to the combination of letters made by lexicographers, we now spell them using a method that our “ninuno” used before, via phonetics. Instead of moving forward, we are now slowly regressing towards a system which we abandoned long ago. Who knows, maybe in the future we might go back to using the alibata.

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