Amis wants the notes to be creepy, if only for their infantilism and disrespect of proper English. But he may be reading too much into the slang. His character’s emails are overly long and burdened with an anxiety about language that doesn’t exist among text messagers. She isn’t using the keyboard in the proper spirit.

That spirit, the spirit of text messaging, is almost certainly closer to Marshall McLuhan than George Orwell. The communications sage foresaw the emergence of a generation rendered both physiologically “electronic” and spiritually connected by computers. Chat rooms aren’t his “global village.” They are, however, evolving a global dialect he would recognize: inclusive and unironic, versed in symbols as much as the alphabet. I have a Chinese friend who finds it easier to communicate in text messaging than in written English, and Mandarin chatrooms in China already employ a number of the more popular symbols.

Is text messaging in English? Clearly. But it is also being written, or spoken, online, using other sorts of linguistic signs. It communicates in a crude but ingenious manner, one that can bridge divides. The biggest barrier, curiously, may prove to be age. After a point, adults want to speak meaningfully. For that, you need words: the right ones, and more than a few.