For many people, texting serves as a useful tool. But for British student Caroline Tagg, a study of text-messaging earned her a PhD. That's right, Dr. Tagg now has a doctorate of philosophy in texting—the first of its kind. To earn the degree, Tagg spent nearly four years studying a total of 11,000 text messages containing 190,000 words and sent by 235 people, all of which she compiled and analyzed in a database. The Telegraph reports:
[Tagg] discovered that people text in the same way as if they were talking, using unnecessary words such as 'oh', 'erm' and often use grammatical abbreviations like 'dunno'.... And she discovered from her 80,000 word thesis that there is more to texting that just abbreviations—something most people associate with texting. "Actually, not many people use abbreviations," she said. "People use playful manipulation and metaphors. It is a playful language. Not only are they quite ...
