Is Texting ruining English?

Just in writing the title of this post the computer gave me the squiggly red line under the word texting. Who doesn't know what the word texting is? This computer apparently. Anyway, Paul Jury, a writer for the Huffington post, gives his take on how texting and the language used in texting is affecting English.

He is very defensive of texting, stating that it does not significantly affect language. He makes some good points stating that it is no different from slang of other generations. He also keenly observes that, "a lot of teenagers are just idiots, in any generation." His final argument doen't hold water with me and that is that texting isn't a degradation of English, but a completely different language. This may be true, but I have gotten some truly horrific e-mails from tweens and teens that wanted me to take them seriously. How much of their language was a result of the texting/facebook method?

Retrieved 8/14/2010 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-jury/5-ways-texting-is-striker_b_657309.html