Technology + Language = Totally Book!

I was pretty sure that reading hadn’t suddenly become the “in” thing to do to impress your peers at high-school. Sure, Harry Potter was very widely read but its essentially an outcast-comes-good story, hardly something the alpha boys and girls are going to go crazy over.

The answer to the mystery lies in that potent combination of technology and laziness. When sending an SMS using predictive text it just so happens that the sequence of key presses to write “cool” is the same to enter “book” (2665). On many phones, “book” is suggested before “cool” so rather than waste energy by pressing another button or two, it’s easier to just send the message and work on redefining the English language. As an added bonus you get to reinforce certain social structures (under 20 vs. over 20) through opaque jargon.

Considering the types of shortcuts used to send quick SMSs (“ok cu l8r 2nite qt”) it makes sense — in a coding theory kind of way — that quirks of predictive text would begin to be exploited like this. You could use similar coincidences as a substitute for offensive language.

Yelling “dual you!” at someone on the street is oddly appropriate.

I came across a similar, technology-driven neologism recently:

Keming. noun. The result of improper kerning.

It’s beautifully self-referential since kerning is a typographical term referring to the spacing between letters. Setting your kerning too small and your ‘r’s and ‘n’s will be set too close together making the combination look suspiciously like the ‘m’ in “keming”.

I really enjoy this playful bending of language through technology. It’s a healthy antidote to the dreariness of the language used in some quarters:

We’ve decided to make some strategic adjustments to the staffing arrangements going forward in relation to current responsibilities.

Not book at all.

Acknowledgements: Image by Cris DeRaud.