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

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

Research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.

As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.

You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.