So, The Goddaughter sent me an email about a week or two ago:

i just decided to look on your culture blog to see woh you were gettin on. Do u pay to make your wbsite?

I told her the bad news about what it costs to have a website, and her next email suggested that she write stuff for my blogs, presumably because that's cheaper for her, and maybe also less of a bother:

want me to tell you anyfink 2 put on u r web? if u do, justr tell me wat ya wanna know

Fair enough. So my reply included the following:

Here are some questions that you could answer, if you feel like it:

What are your favourite books, and why?

What is your favourite music, and why? Do you like classical at all, or do you really like only pop? How's that awful cello playing coming along? And the singing?

What schools have you been too? Which were the best and which were the worst? Who was your best teacher, and what made that teacher so good?

I'm interested by the way you write emails. No capital letters. "2" instead of "to". "u r" for "your", "u" instead of "you", wanna instead of want to. I think I know why this is fun. It's creative, it saves screen space on small screens, and it annoys stupid adults. Is that it? Or are there other reasons for it?

As you can see, I was looking for stuff for my education blog, as well as for here, but I'll give the whole answer here, because what interests me most about what The Goddaughter had put is beyond mere education. It is, of course, the way in which she puts it. Is the word for it "Txt"? I'll call it that here from now on.

Mi fav books R Nancy Drew books cos i like detectiv books. She's 18 and shes the daughter of a lawyer called Carson Drew. She has a b/f called Ned (Nickers)on

I dont necesarly like POP, its just mor modern music dat i like. I like da new singer Avril lavigne. Shee's OK. I like classical as well, but it depends wat it is.Im gettin a bit betta on da cello. I had a lesson 2day wiv my "teacher". I also had a singin lesson 2day. I like singin but id like 2 do mor.

At skewl we R startin da choir. I hope dey R gonna chose me as a solo. Its an english song.

I've bin 2 loads of skewls and the best 1 was Wimbledon House skewl cos i was best of da clas. I was alwayz da best of da class in england!!!!

My fav teach was Mrs. Whales cos she was loads like me. I dont know y, but i just like her.

And this was the answer I was most eager to hear about. What's wiv all the Txting? Y, oh Goddaughter, do u, best of da clas at Wimbledon House skewl, rite like dis?

I rite like dis cos its easier. U make a mistake and u hav an excuse! But this is also easier cos instead of havin 2 think about da word be4 ritin it u just rite it as it is pronounzd!

The Goddaughter is no under-educated underclasser. She was, just as she said, best of the class at Wimbledon House School. Yet here she is riting like dis. Her answer, about why she likes doing this Txt stuff is, I'm sure, all true, and I thank her for it. Very interesting, and most informative. Alice Bachini, who visited me this afternoon and who read all this, commented that when kids write like this, they always seem to be happier, and I bet they are, for all the reasons The Goddaugher itemises, plus they are having creative fun. I bet they have permanent grin on their faces, because of the last little bit of phonetic inventiveness they did. They are playing, rather than working. Doing what they want, rather than following someone else's rules. When you play, there is no wrong answer. Txt turns writing from science into art.

But having lived for almost half a century longer than The Goddaughter, I can assure her that hers is not the first generation of children who would have liked to rite somewhat like dis. The big story here is that modern electronic communication has finally created a world in which The Goddaughter and her millions of contemporaries are writing Txt rather than Standard English because they can. Who can stop them?

Email, and text messaging, and – I'm sure – lots and lots of blogs, have made a world in which Grammarians no longer rule the language. So what if Most People disapprove? Most People aren't reading your Txt messages. In the case of the Goddaughter emailing The Godfather, Most People aren't The Godfather, and if The Godfather is willing to read decypher this stuff (I am), then where's the problem?

This style of writing used to be confined to isolated school subcultures. A billion notes handed around at the back of the class have no doubt been written in a million local variants ofTxt, although even school subcultures were surely heavily infected with Standard English. But Modern Electronics has joined all these subcultures together, and turned them into a vast linguistic arena which is no longer divided and soon if not already conquered by Standard English, but rather one that is an imperial linguistic force in its own right.

Old Guys like me write producer prose about what we want to write. In my case that means doing it in educated English, with the odd spelling error or grammatical carelessness but with no major language games. True, I like the occasional sentence without a verb, and I quite often resort to Not Strictly Correct capital letters, but mostly, I play no games with the language code itself. My games are all in what I write about. But the same freedom I have to put what I want here, in my educated prose, enables The Goddaughter to tell her story her way, in her particular version of Txt. And if Txt doesn't include much in the way of Standard English spelling or punctuation, then that's just 2 bad 4 Standard English.

I can already hear the grumbles when the Fogey tendency over at my education blog comes here and reads the thoughts of The Goddaughter, if they do come here and can stomach the stuff. "Tell your Goddaughter she'll have to spell correctly if she wants to get a Decent Job." Well, no worries. The Goddaughter is tri-lingual in English, French and Roumanian. And she is, to my certain knowledge, bilingual also in Standard English and Txt-ing, or whatever we call it. She'll get a Decent Job.

But more to the point, such Fogeys are missing the point here. The Txt sub-culture is rapidly becoming simply a culture. Who says that people won't ever be able to get jobs if all they can write is Txt? What happens when the Txt-ers are the ones doing the hiring? My guess this process is already well under way, in computer games emporia, pop group management companies, and the like. For many jobs, I should guess that an inability or unwillingness to converse in Txt rules you out of consideration.

The printing press standardised spelling and grammar. (Remember all those jokes about there being fifteen different ways to spell Shakespeare.) It looks to me as if Electronics could be un-standardising it. That's a huge event in the history of language.

Or maybe, the spellcheckers will still function, but with greatly expanded vocabularies L8 will be included by the software writers just after Late. Y, u, 2 and 4 – for why, you, too and for – are already there of course. But, I suspect that a sprinkling of red and green underlinings will be considered de rigeur for your real Txt-er, in other words that for all practical purposes the spellcheckers and grammar hecklers will be switched off.

And yes, you're right if you seem to remember me having written about this Txt thing before. It was in connection with this Samizdata piece.

But this is the first time I've had a real Txter feeding Txt into the postings herself, and what's more she's one I know well. That, for me anyway, gives the whole issue an extra punch.