Orwellian Text Talk

We were in a restaurant enjoying a Friday night fish fry and conversation, catching up on the day's local news and discussing deep topics as our blood pressure readings. Don't snicker, blood pressure numbers are important when you realize you aren't bulletproof anymore. My wife's eye shifted to a nearby table and my eye naturally followed. 

A young (younger than 50 ) couple was preoccupied, no, mesmerized by their phones. Perhaps the secrets of quantum mechanics or The Metaphysic of Morals by Immanuel Kant. More than likely it was texting, that strange new language which I feel is an abomination. 

The English language is important to me. Clear communication is important and I am fearful that texting is gradually usurping the English language as we know it. 

I also use the text media on my phone but I refuse to use text-talk, with it's arcane abbreviations, numbers substituted for letters, lack of sentence structure and pitiful grammar.

I hated English class as a lad but in my senior years I've developed a love for the language, the richness of adjectives and adverbs, the flow of good  sentence structure and good writing. This probably came from my love of reading.  Contrast the writings of any prominent author, John Steinbeck for example, in The Grapes of Wrath, "The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled broken dry grass..." with "hoo r u 4 pack or SF".
Decoded, 'Who are you for, the Packers or San Francisco?"

Orwell called it Newspeak in his visionary novel, 1984. Newspeak eliminated the descriptive depth of writing. It cancelled emotions, flavors, colors, fragrances, odors and replaced it with  mere functionality. There was 'good', "plus good' for better and 'double plus good for terrific or wonderful or fantastic. The English language had become sterile, dead. Omnipresent telescreens bleated out sterilized news and production reports. Music and literature were heretical and the worst part was that anyone talking in the old English would mysteriously disappear, never to be seen again.

Advertising has eroded the language as well, with intentionally incorrect spelling, sentence structure and general disrespect of the English language. Advertising inundates our consciousness as we passively stare at a screen urging us to "By now b 4 it's too late. Hey!"

I feel like Charlie Brown, "I can't stand it."