Certainly, one of the primary goals of abbreviations in text or Twitter-speak is to condense an utterance so that it fits the 160 character limit of a text-message or the 140 character limit of a Twitter post (or Tweet). However, there is also a certain charm, a certain playfulness, involved. There is pleasure in the act of composing with these constraints, an intentional and curious engagement with how sentences, words, and letters make meaning. Composing a text-message is most certainly a literate (and sometimes even literary) act. And, interestingly, the average text-message distorts grammar much less than the naysayers would have us believe. In fact, more often, text-messages rely on very conventional sentence structures and word order to create clear contexts for the various abridgments. However, like a poem, a text-message has the ability to condense what might otherwise be inexpressible into a very small and self-consciously constrained linguistic space. And, like a poem, a clever text-message unravels, offering layers of meaning and interpretability for the reader. For example, neologisms are quite common in the world of texting. In a recent exchange I had via text, “hiyah” came to mean both a greeting (as in “hi ya”) and the sound-effect accompanying a karate-chop, a calculated portmanteau, a “hello” that feels like an assault. Granted, this sort of inventiveness may not be rampant in the wild, but the medium certainly offers and encourages this potential.
