Text Language Should Be Made Illegal

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De thng s I hte txt lnge 2 de core. Who de hell inventd t? I wld lke 2 strngle him by de nck. If de vry aspt f mrdr s agst de lw nd cn rslt n svre pnshmnt thn de mrdr f de eng lnge sld undrg de sme!

God, I hated writing that. Yuck.

If you didn’t understand anything, don’t worry about it. But if you understood those sentences, you are exactly the person this post is intended for.

If there is anything in the world which infuriates me to oblivion it is not horror movies or injustice. Nope, it is the crappy short version of a holy language. Look at the sentences on the first paragraph and the one you are currently reading. Doesn’t the former look disgusting? I don’t know when I began to abhor it because truthfully speaking, when I was a tween and in the process of maturity, I used it (I chastise myself severely for that). At that time, I didn’t realise it would be a crime on my part. Being portrayed uninteresting and dull, I thought using it like everyone else at that time would make me look cool and sophisticated.

Yeah, stupid me.

Only now I realise it was the most immature thing I could have done. Whenever I see text language in my chats, I either feel like cringing or slap the person on the other end of the line. Many times I’ve requested my friends not to use text language, at least not with me, but they just don’t get it.

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I wasn’t joking when I said I wanted to strangle the inventor of this hideousness. One of my close friends from college subconsciously wrote ‘u’ instead of ‘you’ in an assignment in English class and she showed me the red circle our professor marked on it. That’s exactly when I realised I loathed the text language. The time I began my career as an author. I think this hatred for it originated fully fledged after I penned a novel; strictly speaking, English is one of the most beautiful languages the ancient times gave birth to. I honour the people who were the God who created it. I am pretty sure I am not the only one, so why then is a ridiculous form of it predominant in the social networking sites? Is there any pleasure derived out of it or are you merely being lazy? I’d go for the latter. It must be laziness.

If you disagree, please feel free to comment below and enlighten me because I seriously haven’t a clue.

But to me, it does signify that the people who communicate using text language are lazy and want to be saved the labour of typing a whole sentence correctly. Or if the reason is that you are unsure of spelling, there is nothing wrong in sparing a minute of your day to look up a dictionary or the internet for guidance. Or if you can’t have access to the internet, there’s always MS Word which sharply underlines spelling errors and gives the correction. Why then do you want to kill English?

Here are a few awful examples:

Thank you – tanq or ty

Where are you? – whr r u

Got to go, text you later – g2g txt u ltr

How are you? – hw r u

Can I read that book? – cn i rd tat buk

I love reading – i luv readng

But I love murdering the language more – bt i luv mrdrng de lnge more

It goes on and on. As you can see, there is no regard for capitalisation or punctuation. Is this the property of those English classes you attend at school and college? And if you are an English graduate using the text language, feel happy you are not near me right now.

All right, say you are a person who chats in your mother tongue using English alphabets. There are people like that as well. There is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What is wrong is that this revolting short form rears its ugly head there as well. I’m a Tamil girl so I’ll show you the way Tamil words are tortured.

Disclaimer: I took these out of real chats I had with people.

Chellam (it means ‘darling’) – chlm

Yeppo nee veetuku varuva? (when are you coming home?) – Epo ne veetku vruva

Saaptiya? (Did you eat?) – sptya

Na nethu puthu dress vangnen (I bought a new dress yesterday) – na nthu pudu dss vngn

The rest of the letters flew out the nearest window.

You think it’s cool, I think it’s stupid.

Please give a language the respect it is qualified for, guys. Don’t assassinate it, whether it maybe English or Tamil or Hindi or Telugu or whatever. Give it respect. Honour it. A language has a soul too and text language seems to offend it big time.

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