or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
More Buying Choices
36 used & new from £4.00
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Txtng: The Gr8 Db8
 
 
Share your own customer images
Search inside this book

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (Hardcover)

by David Crystal (Author)
3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
RRP: £9.99
Price: £6.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £3.00 (30%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Want guaranteed delivery by Tuesday, November 10? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details
25 new from £4.90 11 used from £4.00
Other Editions: RRP: Our Price: Other Offers:
Paperback £6.99 £5.09 31 used & new from £2.21

Special Offers and Product Promotions

Frequently Bought Together

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 + The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left + The Stories of English
Price For All Three: £18.25

Show availability and shipping details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Language and the Internet

Language and the Internet

by David Crystal
3.7 out of 5 stars (3)  £16.88
The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left

The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left

by David Crystal
4.2 out of 5 stars (6)  £4.39
Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World

Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World

by Naomi S. Baron
£15.48
Words Words Words

Words Words Words

by David Crystal
4.3 out of 5 stars (3)  £5.79
How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning and Languages Live or Die

How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning and Languages Live or Die

by David Crystal
3.0 out of 5 stars (2)  £6.47
› Explore similar items

Product details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: OUP Oxford (5 Jul 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0199544905
  • ISBN-13: 978-0199544905
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13.7 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 35,599 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #2 in  Books > Business, Finance & Law > Management > Management Skills > Communication & Presentation > Email
    #29 in  Books > Reference > Language > Communication
    #51 in  Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Linguistics > Reference

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

  • See Complete Table of Contents

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links

  (What is this?)
   The G8 opens new browser window
Guardian.co.uk  -  Environmental News, Get Tips & Advice on how to be Green. 
  
 

Product Description

Review

He combines an extraordinary knowledge of linguistics with a gift for popularizing. (TLS. )

A highly consumable work of pop linguistics. (Los Angeles Times )

Excellent. Crystal presents a compelling argument in favour of texting as a force for linguistic ability. (Melissa Katsoulis, The Times )


Product Description

This book takes a long hard look at the text-messaging phenomenon and its effects on literacy, language, and society. Young people who seem to spend much of their time texting sometimes appear unable or unwilling to write much else. Media outrage has ensued. "It is bleak, bald, sad shorthand," writes a commentator in the UK Guardian. "It masks dyslexia, poor spelling, and mental laziness." Exam answers using textese and reports that examiners find them acceptable have led to headlines in the tabloids and leaders in the qualities. Do young people text as much as people think? Do adults? Does texting spell the end of literacy? Is there a panic in the media? David Crystal looks at the evidence. He investigates how texting began and who uses it, why and what for. He shows how to interpret its mix of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay, and how it works in different languages. He explores the ways similar devices have been used in different eras and discovers that the texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back a long way, all the way in fact to the origins of writing - and he concludes that far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it.
Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
Search inside this book:

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 
(2)
(1)
(1)
(1)
See all 5 tags...

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8
78% buy the item featured on this page:
Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 3.2 out of 5 stars (4)
£6.99
WAN2TLK?: Ltle Bk of Txt Msgs (Little book)
15% buy
WAN2TLK?: Ltle Bk of Txt Msgs (Little book) 3.0 out of 5 stars (1)
£1.86
The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left
2% buy
The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left 4.2 out of 5 stars (6)
£4.39
The Stories of English
2% buy
The Stories of English 4.4 out of 5 stars (9)
£6.87
Explore similar items
 

Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
5 star:    (0)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:
 (3)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.2 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A tree examined despite the wood., 6 Feb 2009
By O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
How this for a bit of reflexivity: I'm composing the initial draft of this review on a mobile phone. Admittedly, a full qwerty keyboard-toting BlackBerry and not an old school mobile, so not with the numeric keypad limitations of the usual SMS utilising device but, still, typing-one thumbed while I cling on to a tube strap on an underground carriage with my other hand does put the debate into context.

This is an interesting enough, quick read, but it lets itself down in a couple of presentational respects and also in scope.

Firstly, the title and sale. Already on reviews on this site there is a debate between those who find the book a bit dry and dusty and those who point out it is written by a linguistics professor, so you shouldn't really expect anything else. I suppose composing its title in textspeak was an obvious (if somewhat unimaginative) marketing ploy, but the cheap laugh it gets trades badly against its implied presentation as a book of limited ambition and sophistication - one of those impulse buys at the counter that will wind up on the cistern in the loo, rather than a book you'd buy for its own sake.

As it happens, this is a thoughtful and insightful book written (for the layman - I didn't find it dry in the slightest) by an academic and published by Oxford University Press. But the way OUP has elected to market may cause it to fall betwixt cup and lip.

But - assuming we are meant to treat it as a substantive entry - that leads onto some substantive reservations.

Firstly, I'm not so sure what's so distinctly interesting or permanent about SMS texting over instant messaging, email, discussion forums, blogs, twitter and the manifest other forms of electronic communication that have emerged over the last twenty years that it deserves separate treatment.

To be sure, SMS text has produced some unique artefacts, but it has borrowed more ("LOL"s, preposition abbreviations and emoticons are more prevalent in IM and forum posting) and those few artefacts that are unique (as Crystal recounts) are a function of transient technological limitations inherent in the particular format which are likely to be superseded. As data entry technique and information technology evolve (and they already have: things like predictive text, qwerty keyboards on PDAs, and forthcoming inevitabilities like voice recognition) the SMS idiom will almost certainly wane. I suspect, like the facsimile, it is destined for a short but incandescent trajectory through the communicative cosmos.

Secondly, limiting himself as he does, David Crystal is obliged, in a short book, to look at relatively uninteresting aspects of a minor medium (like texting in a foreign language - it takes him a few pages to illustrate this works much like English does - which is no more than the slightest sober reflection would suggest) at the expense of bigger topics of far more interest and relevance to the whole medium of electronic communication. The linguistic implications of non-destructive abbreviation are significant - but again, more so in the world of general electronic communication (where Larry Lessig's book Code: Version 2.0 or Doug Hofstader's I Am a Strange Loop are far more fascinating) and not SMS in particular. The fact that, almost overnight, we have converted our language by means of ASCII into a numerical code which can thus be manipulated, processed and treated is a revolutionary insight, but by limiting himself to texting where those implications amount to very little, Crystal can't really joint the debate.

Finally, Crystal's motive seems to have been to take wind out of the sails of the sorts of grumpy old men (Guardian op-ed columnists and commentators like John Humphrys) who claim (much as they and their kind have done about email, typewriters, television, immigrants, slang, hip hop, cockneys, and even the great vowel shift) that this new blight is destroying all that is precious our language. That's obviously horse-puckey: that it is evolution and not destruction isn't really news, and this isn't debate I'd bother engaging in even as a media commentator, let alone as an academic. No one takes these old curmudgeons seriously anyway.

There is enough in this book to make it worth reading through, but that won't take you long, and it probably would have been better pitched as a feature article in a Sunday paper. Where it could have taken on the Grumpies on their own turf.

Olly Buxton
Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars One strand to the argument, 18 Dec 2008
By G. L. Haggett "glynlhaggett" (UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
An interesting take on a modern phenomenon, but there seems to be but a single strand to Crystal's argument, i.e. that the changes brought about by texting are unlikely to be any greater than those of any other linguistic shift over the years.

For all that, Crystal writes in a welcome clear and direct style which undercuts any suggestion of intellectualism and the glossary, which might have been regarded as padding for what is essentially little more than an extended essay, is a godsend for those of us finding ourselves a little behind the IT 8-ball.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Too dry and academic to appeal to the average reader, 16 Oct 2008
By Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
To tell you the truth, the only part of this book I found truly useful is an appendix listing a significant number of English text abbreviations. Potential readers should take note of the fact that author David Crystal is a professor of linguistics, and so the focus of the book is on the changes - be they positive or negative or both - that the exponential growth in text messaging may or may not be making to language. Don't let that "the gr8 db8" subtitle fool you - there's very little in the way of debate in these pages (Crystal declares text messaging to be a good thing at the end of Chapter 1). It's a pretty boring read, to tell you the truth. I certainly don't see very many people, particularly young individuals, reading this with fascination or great interest.

I try to stay ahead of the crowd when it comes to technology, but I have resisted text messaging - and cell phones in general - for some time now. Having spent four years working at a helpdesk, I pretty much hate telephones; many is the time I've cursed the name of Alexander Graham Bell over the years. I do have a cell phone now, but it's only because my parents foisted one on me; unfortunately, they didn't add text messaging to their plan, so I've never really been able to play around with that technology. Working on a university campus, though, I'm certainly aware that the text messages are flying all around me all day long, and I want and need to learn more about the subject. I'm also aware, albeit tangentially, that the quality of student writing seems to be headed in the wrong direction in recent years, and I've been inclined to agree with those who blame that decline in part on the rise of text messaging. I really wanted to see a substantive debate on that question, but I just don't think this book delivered on its promise in that regard.

Among his reasons for writing this book, David Crystal talks about the lack of any such book bringing together all of the disparate academic studies and papers on text messaging vis-à-vis language. He definitely mined the research fields pretty thoroughly. Unfortunately, the continuous references to all these studies makes for some pretty dry reading for the non-academic. To make matters worse, I can't buy in to some of Crystal's findings and conclusions. For one thing, a lot of these studies involved comparatively small groups. With little to no information on the full scope of possible variables on these studies, I can't help but find them suspect. Even if the data were rock solid and reflected the analysis of much larger study groups, I question some of the author's conclusions, especially since he seemingly made up his mind early on that text messaging's positives outweigh its negatives.

While Crystal does provide a history of text messaging, lays out its unique qualities, and offers his analysis of who uses it and why, I wouldn't really recommend this book to anyone who just wants to learn more about text messaging in general. This is, for the most part, a dry and somewhat academic read. The chapter on text messaging in languages other than English was nothing short of an ordeal. Even if you are familiar with some of the terms in these different languages, you might want to just skip that chapter altogether.

To be sure, there are some interesting facts for readers to glean from these pages, but my feeling is that those with an interest in linguistics may be the only readers who will truly appreciate the author's efforts. The average reader may well have to grit his teeth and persevere just to make it through to the end.
Comment Comments (2) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars y bthr?
I have been reading books by Prof Crystal since I was at university and hold him in regard. This one, I rate as "mildly interesting" and never astonishing. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Diacha

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
   
Related forums

Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category

Look for similar items by subject























i.e., each product must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Feedback

Ad

Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.