To Teet or Not to Teet

 
Everybody would agree that the Internet is a greatest catalyst for language change and evolution. Professor David Crystal has a wonderful video on that issue, How the Internet is changing language today, on Youtube. We have all seen texting come into being and arouse a lot of debate about its usefulness to the English language. Professor Crystal, again, had a wonderful theory debunking all the myths against texting. As a teacher of English and language practitioner, I could notice similar phenomena happening to language. Although it seems difficult to determine whether these changes are happening to English or to Arabic, I am writing now to highlight these changes and record some observations.


 
Before I go into details of my main argument, it seems opportune to unravel a linguistic discovery: the Internet is not only changing languages, it is also uniting them. To understand this to some depth, we need to acknowledge the fact that technology sometimes dictates the use of some language features. Take text messages as an example. You have limited space, 160 characters, to communicate what you want to say. This limitation has stimulated creative minds to develop textisms, abbreviated language like CUL8R, in order to overcome the shortcoming of limited space. Additionally, technology speaks English in the main. Although support to other languages is available, English remains the easiest medium of dealing with computers and the Internet. As a result of that, Internet users in the Arab world, especially younger users, were also creative and devised what we might call Anglo-Arabic, which is Arabic written in Roman alphabet – I should be publishing an article about this soon. This style of writing brought about new writing conventions or, rather, new creative uses of existing characters. For instance, Arabic-speaking users use numbers to represent Arabic letters that do not have equivalents in English like "7" for "Haa", the second letter of the word "Mohamed" in Arabic, and "7'" or "5" for "Khaa", the second and last letter of the word meaning "brother" in Arabic. If you are familiar with Arabic letters, you can easily discover the similarity in shape between these numbers and the corresponding Arabic letters.


 
Facebook, the largest online social networking site with more than 300 million users, is a major contributor to language change. Just as Google first started as a trademark and then evolved into a verb "to google" someone or something, we can find a whole family of words that are related to Facebook. So, we have the name "Facebook" which should be capitalised, the verb "to facebook", to log on Facebook and network with other people, and "facebooking", using Facebook, like "I've got a lot of facebooking to do." Perhaps these words haven't appeared in dictionaries yet – this is clear from the red underlining I can see while composing this. However, people are widely using them.


 
Being a universally used network shared by people from both sexes, a degree of appropriateness dictates an amount of politeness on the part of the users. Friendly communication, of course, knows no such restrictions, but being read and viewed by people who can be outside the circle of your intimate friends makes you watch your words. At least some people care about this.


 
In intimate friendly conversations, friends might feel at ease using what we call swear words. Naturally, these words can only be circulated among close friends, but not in public. Now, you are in a situation that combines both the intimate and the public. So, what should you do? You need to feel free among the people you know and you need not to be offensive to other people who may see what you share on Facebook. Creativity is at work once more. It's all about realising and making connections between existing conventions and new purposes; new uses. Now swearing is to retreat in favour of "teeting".


 
If you trace the history of the word, you can easily find out that "teeeet" is the sound we hear on some censored TV shows when a speaker says an inappropriate word like "teeeeeeeeeet" and "teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet". Of course I can't replace these teets with the actual words because it would be inappropriate to say such swear words in public. Censors do this because they try to make sure that any content broadcast to the public be "appropriate".


 
Now a new family of words has appeared. We can think of the verb "to teet", to express anger without using swear words, the nouns "teet", a more polite word to use than a swear word when you are angry, "teeter", a person who teets, and "teeting", the act of using teets.


 
When I raised this discussion in class, some people got angry and felt offended. They argued that whether it's teeting or swearing the meaning is equally offensive. Others, on the other hand, saw that teeting is by far better than swearing; it is a euphemism linguistically speaking. I have written this article, as I mentioned in the beginning, not to say whether I'm pro or anti teeting. Rather, I'm just trying to make a record of an existing phenomenon (interestingly enough, teeting is a feature of written as much as it is of spoken language – at least until data piles up to determine in which medium it is more frequent.) Whether it is good or bad on social grounds is not the business of linguistics; it can be better studied in sociology or anthropology I think.

In linguistics, we know that language is shaped by the needs of its users. Accordingly, I would say, teeting is good insomuch as it helps people communicate in a better way and as it is a sign of linguistic creativity.