Sex, money, abuse: TXTNG doesn’t cut it

It’s provided us with a lexicon of abbreviations, but txt isn’t real slang, says jonathon green

Slang's themes – sex, money, vilification, excess all areas – might be a little blunted, but the lust for the latest take on the old verbal game remains unabated. Thus the slang lexicographer hoped for much from the advent of SMS, better known as texting. A virgin lexis, and almost wholly created and used by the young, always the dependable progenitors of counter-linguistic treasures.

Not only that, but there's a moral panic. Forget Iran, forget knife crime, set aside the paradox of using an instrument designed for speech as the most limited of typewriters: shudder instead at such apocalyptic notations as CUL8R, LOL and BTDT. Those very young, plunging lemming-like into their on-screen chatter, will lose the ability to spell, to write, to communicate… to think. Worse still, these dread neologisms are appearing in examination work. Not to mention

punctuation: whither, after all, the semi-colon if now – turned pictogram – it represents a crooked grin.

For a slang lexicographer, ever-devoted to language in its most combative extremes, such arrivals are of course of much interest. The database is readied, the researchers briefed, the dictionary's front page, as it were, held. And for what? A new outpouring of criminal argot? Some micro-glossary dredged from hitherto untapped perversions, or even some new turn on the tourists' delight: rhyming slang?

And we find? Well, as slang would put it: Zip. Zilch. SFA. That's sweet fuck all. OK, the medium is the message: the moby's 160-character screen doesn't offer much, even if, as David Crystal explains in his mildly entertaining new book txtng: the gr8 db8, there are regular outpourings of txt-based poetry.

But slang it isn't. Sorry. Slang has its abbreviations, natch, but it also offers 1,000 synonyms for the penis (the meat axe, the blue-veined custard-chucker, the chutney ferret), and for the vagina too (the poor