David Crystal Quotes

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say 'LOL.' Just what? But it means 'laugh.' Why don't you just laugh? What are you doing?

The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past.

When we look at the specific effect of the Internet on language, languages asking the question, 'Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet?' the answer has to be no.

In the future, things will truncate! No, in the age of Twitter, we can't be upset when words become shorter.

The Internet now is completely full of memes, and it's interesting, the idea that instead of having a sign crotched on your door or a magnet on your fridge saying whatever cliches and bon mots, pictures laid out with some text are passed around and move really fast.

The internet is like a gossipy girls' locker room after school, isn't it?

Now we're e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.

I grew up in a physical world, and I speak English. The next generation is growing up in a digital world, and they speak social.

Virtuality - connection without proximity - is a major attraction in both fandom and the Net. Nobody knows you're a dog through the U.S. mail, either. Fans could be utterly different in their fanzine persona, which may be why both fandom and the Net were invented by individualistic Americans.

E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.

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.

I was raised on the Internet.

'LOL' is one of several texting expressions that convey nuance in a system where you don't have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would.

Whenever I'm on my computer, I don't type 'lol'. I type 'lqtm' - laugh quietly to myself. It's more honest.

Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools.

Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.

The internet is a wild land with its own games, languages and gestures through which we are starting to share common feelings.

In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.

People talk about the age and positioning of a brand, but hell, it's not about that. The global language is digital, and we need to speak the language.

The digital native doesn't send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online and starts a blog.

People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it, you find they're not.

The Internet has given us 10 or 15 new styles of communication: long messages like blogging, and then short messages like texting and tweeting. I see it all as part of an expanding array of linguistic possibilities.

New words can spread like wildfire thanks to social media - you only have to look at 'mansplaining' and 'milkshake duck' to see language evolution at work - so why not old ones too?

I do think technology really has changed the way that we communicate with each other and texting can be the way to communicate and to kind of get up the nerve to say things that maybe you wouldn't say in real life, but that also comes with a price.

Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.