Texting? Natural. Twittering? EVIL!

That’s what you get when you combine John McWhorter’s fine mini-lecture on texting-talk as an “emergent complexity” of human linguistic evolution, or more helpfully, as “fingered speech,” with Matt Labash’s deliciously long TWS essay on why twitter, and the performative non-deliberative sort of declamation/addiction it represents, will destroy civilization, and produce Twidiocracy .

I, who remain a foreigner to both phenomena, highly recommend both pieces. Perhaps those of you further along in the process of human evolution can explain why they might both be right.

(H/T Booker Rising for the McWhorter)

Next
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Letters

Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…

The Revival of Patristics

Stephen O. Presley

On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…

The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics

Itxu Díaz

Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…