-exting
by Tommy
EDIT 17:13 – The post below is from an article from the Boston Globe – an error on my part meant that the introductory link above and the block quotes I originally had around the parts that weren’t mine didn’t show in the final post here. Apologies to the author Erin McKean – I wasn’t trying to steal your work :) Quoted parts now clearly marked.
As sporty people will know (Dad, sit up), Tiger Woods made his quasi-triumphant return to the world of golf earlier this month. It’s an excuse, however flimsy, for the Aunt-Petunia-from-Harry-Potter-style gossip mongers to come out in force and have a good old-fashioned chinwag about the whole affair. One of the few good things to come out (insert your own innuendo here) of the whole ordeal, this blogger thinks, is the introduction of the world chexting into the world.
Chexting, as the name suggests, is cheating on one’s spouse or partner through the medium of text messages,”. It’s not really a new word — there are examples of use dating back to at least the mid-2000s. But what chexting lacks in recency it makes up for in interestingness, at least linguistically. It’s the suffix -exting that grabs our attention. We’re used to it from the shock-horror, kids-these-days, what-is-the-world-coming-to word sexting, which refers to taking nude or seminude pictures with a camera phone and then sending them as texts (usually with tragic results). So used to it in fact, that in writing this post, all other -exting words were questioned by Chrome’s spellcheck function except for sexting.
-Exting is blended into other relationship words as well — brexting (breaking up with someone via text message, a truly slimy thing to do), drexting (sending text messages — often amorous ones — while drunk), confexting (confessing something — possibly chexting? — via text message), and fexting (fake-texting, that is, pretending to be sending a text message in order to avoid talking to someone).
And those are just the quote unquote serious, relationshippy ones. There are also plenty of jokey or facetious -exting words, including hexting (sending curses via text message), Czexting (sending text messages in Czech), Quebexting (sending text messages in Canada), objexting (what lawyers do when they text in the courtroom), vexting (sending intentionally upsetting text messages), and wexting (texting while walking).
It seems that -exting has its own kind of cultural pop, with an overtone of salaciousness — but why? Part of the reason is that we already “know” that text-messaging is supposed to be bad for us. It’s making us dumber, and degrading our language, or so the thinking goes. (David Crystal, the noted linguist, efficiently debunks in his recent book, “Txting: The gr8 db8.” At least one study has found that children who used the most abbreviations in their text messages scored the best on tests of reading and vocabulary. So there.)
It may also be that a salacious text message leaves no room for innocent explanations. No one accidentally hits the “flirt” button on their cellphone, and there’s no “can’t stop thinking about you, baby” autocomplete. When we hear the word chexting, we think not only of the chexter’s behavior, but also of their partner’s dismay at having to discover the infidelity on a tiny screen. (Of course, maybe that partner was “pexting,” peeking at another person’s text message.)