Texting Could Make You Smarter

I don’t know about you, but where I grew up, we were taught the Queen’s English, and abbreviations were very much shunned upon in our writing. The advent of text messaging on mobile phones and via IRC (yeah, there was no such thing as Skype back then, and to have an ICQ account was the “in thing”) helped evolve the English language, as short forms and the removal of vowels became the norm in an effort to be more concise in communications (as well as to save money by not passing the 160 character mark in a SMS). Most folks would lament that this makes modern day kids and adults less proficient at communication, but linguist John McWhorter begs to differ, touting that texting is actually a “linguistic miracle happening right under our noses.”

McWhorter said, “If humanity existed for 24 hours, writing only came around at 11:07 p.m.” In a nutshell, he figures out that being bidialectal (one in “texting mode” while the other is natural writing and conversation) would help you exercise different parts of your brain, and eventually, that might help increase your IQ. Who knows?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: sms