text - etymology & story - podictionary 555

The other day I was listening to a radio piece about teenagers
driving, what with all the grad parties that had been going on.  What
struck me was one cop’s description of impaired driving that extended
beyond driving drunk.  She said drivers were sometimes impaired when
they had too many other teenagers in the car or if they were trying to
drive and talk on the phone at the same time.  Now, I actually have a
personal connection to someone who has been known to send emails from a
blackberry while driving on a major, busy highway.  To my knowledge he
is still living.

But that brings me to the word text.  Blackberries have
brought mobile email to wide usage but before that people were sending
text messages on their cell phones.  The noun text has become a verb.

I checked out the website wordspy.com
to see when the first citation was for this kind of texting.  Paul
McFedries runs wordspy and he’s found an early citation in January of
1999 from Business World magazine.  I went to wordspy because
I know that this is just the type of word usage that it does well
with.  I figured that because it takes so long for the Oxford English
Dictionary to get updated, there was little chance that they would have
such a current meaning.

How wrong I was.

Business World is a pretty mainstream publication so one
might expect that if a new word had made it to print there it might
have actually been in use for some time before hand.  After taking
about 100 years to get the behemoth OED active in being
current with new words I gotta give credit to Oxford University Press
on the reach they are extending because in the draft third edition of
the OED they have a first citation for text the verb in this sense that predates wordspy’s by nine months.

The best part is that they pulled their citation from a usenet newsgroup; alt.celular.gsm.

The next surprise is that the verb to text is actually much older than cell phones.  The first citation for text as
a verb comes in the year of William Shakespeare’s birth, 1564.  That
first use wasn’t as you might expect some synonym for the verb “to
write” (although that did come later), instead it was what you did if
you were quoting some passage in an argument.  To text was at first to
cite the authority of something written down.

This relates to why a textbook like you’d use in school is called a textbook.  I mean, aren’t all books with writing in them “text books?”  As early on as we have evidence for the word text in
English—that’s since the 1300s—one of the meanings it’s held has been
“an authoritative source.”  In part this stems from biblical texts
where the written words were seen as the very word of God.  So it’s
this sense of the authoritative nature of text that makes a school textbook a textbook.

That date of the 1300s is squarely where you’d expect a word that
comes from Old Norman French to appear.  Before it was French of course
it was Latin in the form of textus.  But this was a Latin metaphor.  Originally text didn’t mean the words on the page, but the style in which a work was put together; how the arguments were woven.  You see, text derives from the same Indo-European source as textile.  Textus was the thread ideas of woven into a fabric of argument.

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