Dear John Humphrys,

Eight years ago, you wrote an interesting article arguing that ‘texting is wrecking our language’. I strongly disagree with this as I believe language cannot be wrecked, however I do believe language can be changed. And this change isn’t a negative change, this change is a positive change. Change helps language to become even stronger. Your article was written in 2007, so I understand why you feared that negative change might occur.

You said that texters are ‘…pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary.’ I disagree with you as I believe texting is just a form of quick communication from one person to another. And if texting is changing the way we speak or write, so what? Language is changing every day and if it didn’t change, the way we communicate would be boring. That’s the beauty of language. We get bored with using the same word over and over again, so we decide to add more words that mean exactly the same. This is why vocabulary will never be tedious and dull. Language will forever stay exciting and enjoyable, and will never get to the stage where you don’t enjoy it anymore. This is why I believe language is changing, but is not becoming ‘wrecked’.

You argued that texting has caused the Oxford English Dictionary to remove the hyphen from no fewer than 16,000 words. I agree with you that texting is the main cause for this but this isn’t a negative cause like the way you are portraying it. I believe that removing the hyphen from 16,000 words is best as it is quicker and more efficient. Life is too short for you to be worrying about extra hyphens. I understand that you are a journalist but does a footballer worry about what colour his laces are? I don’t think so. Your article even backs up my argument. You showed me that you prefer typing with faster and more efficient shortcuts. You used the abbreviation ‘OED’, instead of saying ‘Oxford English Dictionary’. Why do you think this is? The answer is simple. You just want quicker ways of getting your point across. In response, I would argue that quicker and more efficient shortcuts do not change language negatively but actually change language positively.

Now, my next and final point. I’m not going to counter argue with another one of you arguments because I believe I’ve done that enough. I would like to bring something else to the table. The Latin language; a language that has died out because of upcoming languages. One of them being the English Language. Mr. John Humphrys, don’t you believe that what  texting is doing to English, is what English did to Latin? And don’t you think English is a better language than Latin? Well, this backs up my opinion on language being changed to be improved. Language can never be wrecked. Language is changing day by day. But does this mean language is becoming more wrecked day by day? NO. In fact, language is actually becoming better and better everyday.

To conclude, language will never become wrecked. Whether that means texting is affecting language, or new forms of the language are being made or even hyphens or other types of punctuation get removed from the Oxford English Dictionary (or OED as you like to call it), language will still never ever become wrecked. I believe language just changes constantly. Language evolves day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute and even second by second. However, these added changes enhance the beauty of language and if language doesn’t change, language would be boring, tedious and dull. Because of change language is actually beautiful, interesting and compelling.