ABSTRACT
The Daily Mail takes a more descriptive approach to language’s ingenuity, reporting the advent of text message abbreviations in the formal context of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. ‘To the linguistic purist’, they argue, ‘they may well be an abomination’, but, ‘in a world demanding instant communication they are here to stay’. What the OED, another significant abbreviation, confers is legitimacy: this is the proof that texting has arrived.
