Alan Jacobs


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Twitter is all about slang and abbreviations, but it’s just not eroding the English language. In fact, University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman found the exact opposite: It’s making it better.
Twitter Is Not the Enemy of the English Language - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

Hey, hang on a minute, no he doesn’t. Liberman doesn’t in any way suggest that Twitter is making language better or worse. He just says that the claim that Twitter is causing us to use shorter words doesn’t seem to be borne out by the evidence. Let’s not replace unsubstantiated doom-&-gloom with unsubstantiated euphoria.