As a millennial, I still remember calling my high school best friend and talking for hours until there was nothing in our lives the other didn’t know about. But the world has changed a lot since then and so has our communication habits.
In 2018, there were 2.25 billion mobile phone messaging app users globally and this number is expected to grow to 3.5 billion by 2025. In many places, the phrase “Everyone’s texting” is not even an exaggeration.
But reducing an interaction to just symbols can be tricky. When there’s so little that holds a conversation together, things are bound to get (a little) chaotic. And the Instagram account ‘Funny Texts‘ is a perfect example of that.
From contacting the wrong number to simple puns, continue scrolling to check out what it has to offer.
WeChat is popular in China, Line is big in Japan, and WhatsApp… Well, it’s WhatsApp. It has 2 million users. But in these apps, messages travel over the internet rather than over phone lines like SMS texts and, interestingly, the United States is one of the few big countries where SMS, the texting technology with origins in the 1980s, remains a standard way to chat.
As Shira Ovide highlighted in The New York Times, America’s SMS exceptionalism has its pros and cons. The biggest benefits of SMS are that it works on almost any phone, and people are not locked into one company’s communications world. The drag, however, is that SMS has security flaws, and it lacks features of modern chat apps like notifications that your friend has read your message, or the ability to start a video call from a text.
Many people also think that texting is bad because it makes us lazy in the way we speak, but language guru David Crystal thinks that it’s causing neither bad spelling nor moral decay.
The UK’s leading linguistic academic told The Guardian, “Almost every basic principle that people hold about texting turns out to be misconceived.”
“Misspelling isn’t universal: analysis shows that only 10% of words used in texts are misspelled. Nor are most texts sent by kids: 80% are sent by businesses and adults,” Crystal explained.
“Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.”
According to Crystal, if you can’t spell a word, then you don’t really know whether it’s cool to misspell it in the first place.
“Kids have a very precise idea of context – none of those I have spoken to would dream of using text abbreviations in their exams – they know they would be marked down for it.”
Of course, changing public opinion is hard work, but Crystal is hopeful he can convert the linguistic reactionaries.
“The reality is that people have always had a tremendous fear about the impact of new technology on language,” Crystal said.
“When the printing press was first invented, people thought it was an instrument of the devil that would spawn unauthorized versions of the Bible. The telephone created fears of a breakdown in family life, with people no longer speaking directly to one another. And radio and television raised concerns about brainwashing.
“Text messaging is just the most recent focus of people’s anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language.”
At its most basic, language is an expression of identity. How we speak is central to who we think we are and where we think we belong. So feel free, experiment, and send the funniest results of your ‘studies’ to ‘Funny Texts!’
