Fingered Speech
Is texting a form of speech rather than a form of writing?
I think that John McWhorter made a very interesting argument in his Ted Talk, “Texting is Killing Language.” In his talk, he said that texting was “fingered speech.” In addition to saying that texting was “fingered speech”, he also claimed that people do not think about things like capitalization and punctuation when they text.
“Do you think about those things when you talk? No. So, why would you when texting?” He asked the audience.
I personally disagree with this logic wholeheartedly.
“What texting is… is fingered speech,” said John McWhorter, an American academic and linguist.
Texting absolutely is a form of writing for the same points that McWhorter attributed to texting as a form of speech.
First of all, he said that people do not think about capitalization or punctuation when they text, and that is simply not true. In fact, both elements of grammar play a pivotal role in creating a tone that the sender wants their receiver to decode.
Capital letters, for example, express a great deal of emotion. Be it anger or excitement—capitalization is key to setting a passionate tone. In fact, the association of capitalization with loudness or big expression can be traced back to the 1940’s.
The second element of grammar McWhorter claimed that we do not think about when texting is punctuation. Like capitalization, punctuation is critical to the receiver’s interpretation of tone. For example, putting a period at the end of a short text message can imply that the sender is being short or is frustrated with the one they are replying to. One study done at Binghamton University confirmed this.
Having established the true importance of punctuation and capitalization in texting, there are other things, too, that we think about with texting that we do not think about when we speak.
When we spell our words in a text message, for example, there are a great deal of manipulations made in order to produce a desired tone or interpretation. Many people will add extra letters to certain words in order to draw the words out; by doing this, the sender believes themselves to sound more dramatic, playful, or even flirty.
McWhorter ultimately said in his talk, “We write like we speak.”
Just because we write like we speak does not mean that texting is a form of speech. And, in fact, I sincerely think that we do not write like we speak.
As discussed in our reading, there are many different dialects of a language, and these dialects can be labeled as either good or bad, which means that only some are recognized and relied on in technology, academia, and the professional world.
The iPhone, for example, only has two dialect settings for the English language; those being British English and American English. So, unless one shuts off their autocorrect, their text messages will constantly be autocorrected to follow the rules of either Standard American English or British English.
This weakens McWhorter’s argument because someone with a dialect that is not one of the two programmed into the iPhone will deal with constant autocorrecting until their message looks nothing at all like the speech of the texter.
Side Note: Siri can also be rather picky with the way in which things are worded. If someone uses a southern dialect, for example, Siri may not be able to understand certain words that that Southerner uses because Siri is programmed to only recognize two specific English dialects. This, of course, should improve as technology continues to advance, but it still proves a point about the treatment of dialects in today’s world.
Ultimately, I do not agree with McWhorter. We may try to write like we speak in text messages, but we still worry about the same grammar rules that we use in actual writing; the rules have only changed to better set the tone for the receiver, and this brings me to my final point.
Just because we write like we speak does not mean that texting is a form of speech.
At the end of the day, texting is not a “fingered speech” because, when we speak, we can demonstrate our tone to the person through voice, word choice, and body language. Therefore, we have much more control over the receiver’s interpretation of us.
However, when we text, we have to worry about the interpretation that the receiver decodes, which leads to the great stress over capitalization, punctuation, and spelling—elements we do not think about when speaking.