EW Speaks Out

BY: EW, aka edub

Texting is the new talking…

Okay so we have entered a world where talking is becoming obsolete. It all began with pager, or beepers to some, and has progressed to email and now the wonderful world of text messaging, t-messaging, or just plain tm-ing. Before we know it ‘tm’ will be an entry in the American Heritage Dictionary defined as “v. 1. to communicate.”

Now there have been many developments to make this phenomenon easier, faster, and more efficient. There are the blackberries, treo’s, and sidekicks for easier, faster, and more efficient thumb typing. And on the cell phones: T9 Word option. BUT, do not be fooled by T9, it is a deceiving application.

A group of experts surely got together to decide which words that use the same numbers are more common. For example, why is ‘of’ more used than ‘me’? what about ‘good’ and ‘home’? why are more people typing ‘room’ than ‘soon’? ‘is’ and ‘it.’ ‘he’ and ‘if’, ‘go’ and ‘in.’ the examples go on. Before you know it you are telling someone ‘I am going good for the weekend’ or ‘let of know he he can in.’

But perhaps the best example of all happened to yours truly a couple Saturday nights ago around 3:00am. I was leaving a bar with a couple guy friends from college, and decided to inform my roommate of my late-night plans. I tm-ed her the following: “I am going to cool some sausage.” She reads in awe, disgust, and utter confusion. No response from her. The next day we are bumming around on a usual Sunday; she asks me in her room to ‘talk.’ “so…Elizabeth, what did you do last night after the bars?” and I told her, “wow, it was crazy, we went to Max’s and played football in the street while we waiting for our late night snack to cook, some applewood smoked chicken and pork sausage.” Ah hah! the light goes on, apparently ‘cool’ is the more widely used word, according to the experts at the T9 headquarters, than ‘cook’. This was potentially disastrous: what if Meghan had been my mother, my brother, my boyfriend??? You can only imagine what a boyfriend would respond to my adventures in “cooling sausage.”

And sometimes the T9 replaces your vernacular with a word that does not exist in the English language. Try typing ‘freaking,’ a common adjective used by many Americans in everyday jargon. But “no thanks,” T9 says, “I see your ‘freaking’ and raise you a ‘freakhog.’” Freakhog!? So I decided to look it up: and answer me this: when entering ‘freakhog,’ why would the dictionary.com say: ‘did you mean freak-hog’ and I say, why yes, perhaps I am missing that hyphen and it is indeed ‘freak-hog.’ Then they give you the ‘no matches found.’ Why would they offer you the alternative if it does not exist either? THEN they ask if you meant ‘fire-hook.’ Oooh, because that makes a whole lot of sense, you know, because both words share the same letters…. ‘f’ , ‘r’ , and ‘h’. unbelievable.

I do not think T9 is useful or efficient. If you are a conscientious tm-er, you proofread, and upon finding multiple T9-caused errors, you need to go back to Abc option and edit….time-consuming. I boycott both T9 AND dictionary.com from now on. thanks for the thought but no help at all!