2b?nt2b?=???

If you can read this, then you are really uptodate with the world of text messaging. If you can't, well.. this is the mobile text version of Shakespeare's "to be or not to be that is the question". The issue discussed these days is about the project to render some of the greatest literary works into text messaging speak. You can read about it here in the Independent or here on CNN, among other things. It's a debatable issue of course, with supporters like John Sutherland, professor of English literature at UCL who is said to be behind the project, and opposers like the author Oliver Kamm.

The idea is that it provides important educational opportunities to students by helping them to remember the basic elements of the literary works they're studying through summarising them in a language they understand! Personally, I don't see how this service can be of any real use to students, other than being a new cool fad that they will play with on their phones for a while. After all, the important thing is to interpret and understand the original text and not to memorise a couple of lines. I mean surely a teacher talking about Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice can describe him as "fit&loadd" instead of "handsome and wealthy" and get a few laughs out of this in class but that's not the point. Call me old fashioned but I think that a BIG part of why we study literature in the first place is that we get to read some of the best work written in English and that is the beauty of it.. the language. Students at some level may sometimes resort to simplified versions of the work they're studying to help them understand it, but the textification output is just too simplistic to be meaningful and in the end you have to get back to the original text anyway. It just seems like a waste of time and effort to me.

Mai