Texty-Text

Britain, apparently, sends one billion texts a week (a swift pounding of the buttons on my calculator reveals this to be around 17 per person). This seems high to me as I seldom send texts, though I‘m sure some spotty nimble-fingered teenager is gleefully making up the numbers.

I don’t much like texting, primarily due to my inability to write succinctly and unwillingness to abbreviate. Antidisestablishmentarianism would cost 10p on its own, while tintinnabulations, floccinaucinihilipilification and other wordage of the sort which used to generate enormous word scores on Catchword* would leave scant space for horrible hybrid number/letter compound wordage such as “C U l8er gr8 m8!” etc.” Urgh…

But then maybe I’m a Luddite, or old. Or both.

* Catchword was a late ‘80s teatime gameshow presented by Paul Coia and is not to be confused with Catchphrase hosted by Roy “Riiiiiiiiight!” Walker. It consisted of word-play in a sub-Countdown sort of way with a bargain-bin set and a noteable absence of Mr Chips. In one particularly unfair round, contestants were tasked with coming up with as many words as possible from a random selection of three letters. Invariably, the first contestant would get letters like S N G and reel off a list of 20 words (singing, slaughtering, sleeping etc.), while his opponent would get a bastard selection of letters like B Z J and spend an uncomfortable 30 seconds sweating like a boxer with the camera looming in for a close-up on his red glistening face while his blood pressure swelled to bursting point.

The prize for winning was a dictionary.