Text messaging is just the most recent focus of people's anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language.

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.

Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible.

Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.

In effect we are, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer is simply: for fun

English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.