Its lyk da bst fng eva!

You get two blogs today, you lucky people, because I'm not going to be able to do another one for a week due to being out all next week.

Now I may not exactly be a grand master of the English language - I occasionally place apostrophes in erroneous places and there is the odd infinitive that I dare to split - but on the whole my written English is fairly good, even if I do say so myself. Which I just did.

Which is why I hate text speak. Or txt spk, as the lazy vowel-averse thumb-typing youth of today would call it.

I understand the origin - I've had a mobile phone for over ten years - and I understand why you would use it on a mobile. You have a limited space for text, and entering each message is laborious, so making it more efficient by shortening words is a good thing. I suppose it's similar to shorthand in a way, and perhaps a little ingenious. I've even been known to shorten the occasional word and even - gasp! - to use numbers in words, e.g. 2nite when I'm running short on space.

But it has its place, and its place is in mobile phones. There is no such limitation in any other form of communication, except perhaps in note-taking when standard shorthand would be far more appropriate anyway. Typing tonight instead of 2nite does not take noticeably longer, so there is no need to use it when typing an email, for example.

Sometimes I see Jessica talking to her friends on MSN. Jessica isn't too bad, fortunately, but I need an interpreter to translate what her friends are writing.

We are standing at a fork in the road of the English language. Within the next twenty years or so, the sort of delightful, flowing prose you are enjoying now will exist only in the library, on the dusty bookshelves at the back that nobody goes to (yes, yes, don't say that's the best place for this blog). The children of today will now be working and the language we know and love will be degenerating rapidly. Within forty years the last of the current English teachers will be retiring, and all new children will be taught only in txt spk. Children at public schools will take lessons in Old English in the same way that Latin is taught now.

We must rise above this and stamp out this threat to our heritage. Or else our grandchildren will be reading the translated version of Hry Ptr nd da Flosfr Stn.

The scariest part is that you probably understood that last sentence.