Journal 4 Response

In the essay, "OMG Shut Up!" Meghan Koehler writes an interesting point of view on texting and its effects on the youth's literacy skills. She claims that it will be a huge negative impact on our culture, and it is slowly destroying the language. She brings up this is a serious topic because it was in the news, and did a lot of research on the topic giving her some credibility for her work. Also, she interviews four individuals on their opinions and how texting has effected them. In general, I think she makes a very lame point. All of her examples have been very extremes of textspeak, and her main points are coming from four people who may or may not be heavy texters. But what I did notice, was the similarity of two things. If texting is to alter the language from people forgetting rules and new ways of communication take over, than wouldn't that be very similar to the original Shakespearian quote that she uses in the beginning. She claims that the original meaning is lost, but also a new meaning is born. Just as English and language has always been. Is she sad we don't use the old Latin and Germanic roots? Another point is that there is a much more extreme version of textspeak. It is called leet speak (or 1337 5P3@|<). This is a much more complicated version of what upsets Koehler, and is much more commonly found online in forums and chat boards. Adapting this type of language does very little to effect the English language. Yes, it still does but it is not ruining it. I think that she needs to explain why the current form of the English language is superior and why advancing culturally is a bad thing.