full transcript

From the Ted Talk by John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

Unscramble the Blue Letters

The saslh is ienrtntseig. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a cseirtoovann and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think —" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is cghane the topic. You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All seokpn languages have what a linuigst calls a new information marker — or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash.

Open Cloze

The _____ is ___________. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a ____________ and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think —" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is ______ the topic. You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All ______ languages have what a ________ calls a new information marker — or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash.

Solution

  1. interesting
  2. spoken
  3. slash
  4. conversation
  5. change
  6. linguist

Original Text

The slash is interesting. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think —" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is change the topic. You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker — or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
young people 5
emergent complexity 2
casual speech 2
fingered speech 2
message board 2

Important Words

  1. calls
  2. change
  3. changing
  4. conversation
  5. developed
  6. developing
  7. distance
  8. gracefully
  9. information
  10. interesting
  11. jake
  12. kind
  13. languages
  14. laughter
  15. life
  16. linguist
  17. marker
  18. medium
  19. mundane
  20. notice
  21. pat
  22. real
  23. slash
  24. spoken
  25. talking
  26. texting
  27. thighs
  28. topic
  29. ways
  30. wistfully
  31. zip