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

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.

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

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.

The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.

At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.

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