**CLICK ON NOTES FOR TEXT SPEAK DEFINITIONS**

I’m curious to know how many high school or college students would be able to tell you the meaning of this Shakespearian passage.

Look thou be true; do not give dalliance Too…much the rein: the strongest oaths are straw To the fire i’ the blood: be more abstemious, Or else, good night your vow!

But the youth of today who are adept at using the SMS shorthand “text speak” will easily be able to tell you what this means:

“brb im rofl after vine vid cmu #lmfao”

Looking at these two vastly different passages raises the question of how the English language will continue to change. I believe Shakespeare’s evolution of the language can serve as the crystal ball.

The website Shakespeare-Online notes, “The English language owes a great debt to Shakespeare. He invented over 1700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original.”

Teenagers and young adults, as well as tech savvy thirty- and forty- somethings, already use text speak to communicate with one another and create new combinations of words on a daily basis. Our descendants might wonder WTDB?

Perhaps are current generation of text speakers are only following this Shakespearian tradition by promulgating their zany linguistical flair to coming generations by metamorphosing the way we write. Looking up a phrase written in text speak is no different than a person learning the definition of a word invented by Shakespeare in his time.

Albeit, text speak appears to lack the poetic qualities Shakespeare imbued in his work, but our descendants might think, “BITD, AFAIC, those XQZT words Shakespeare used were a CWOT.”

Is it that farfetched to think our offspring will look at our present usage of the English language—from an author like Cormac McCarthy who penned the ultra brilliant and ultra confusing Blood Meridian—the way we look at Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? I believe they might.

But I hope I’ve erred in my estimation of unborn generations. I’m not ready to live in a world where books are written in text speak. I currently feel like I’m trapped in linguistic purgatory; I’m neither sophisticated enough to understand Shakespeare nor adept enough to use the nuances of text speak. But I’ll be resting in my grave before this shift occurs—it takes many generations.

I believe it’s more likely that commonly used text speak like “OMG” or “LOL” will continue to infiltrate books and newspapers; but I don’t think we will ever see the day when an entire book is composed using purely text speak.

Wait a second. You mean someone has already done this with the most holy book of all time? With the Bible?

TKU4UK in reading this and c u L8R gator.