Two South Korean teenagers have been crowned fastest texters in the world. The team of 17-year-old Bae Yeong Ho and 18-year-old Ha Mok Min went thumb-to-thumb against competitors from a dozen countries to win the title in a competition yesterday in New York City.
The drill of the third annual LG Mobile World Cup was simple: Copying words and phrases in one’s native language off a monitor correctly. That meant with no typos or abbreviations – that is, no ‘textspeak’ – and as fast as possible with the required capitalization and punctuation.
Some words were intentionally misspelled to test alertness.
The World Cup challenged nimble-fingered youths on both speed and accuracy. The winning team took home a $100,000 prize. Second place and $20,000 went to the U.S. contestants – 16-year-old Kate Moore of Des Moines, Iowa, who is the 2009 U.S. National Texting Champion, and 14-year-old Morgan Dynda of Pooler, Georgia, the 2009 runner-up. An Argentinian team came in third and the Brazilians took fourth. Britain did not participate in the competition.
Miss Moore of the American team averages 12,000 texts per month, entering up to 3.5 characters per second. The Koreans, however, were even faster. With many languages at play, English was the texting language of the U.S. competitors and those from Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Other nations represented were Indonesia, Portugal, Russia, Mexico and Spain. Interpreters were hired for non-texting communication.
‘Bae, the Korean national champion for 2008 and 2009, has a beautiful bass voice and is saving his $50,000 share of the prize to study to become an opera singer. Ha said she’s saving for studies to become an engineer.
Daily Mail
Vocabulary
drill – gyakorlat
typo – írásbeli hiba
abbreviation – rövidítés
capitalization – nagybet?s írás
punctuation – írásjelekkel ellátás
to misspell – rosszul bet?z, rosszul ír
nimble-fingered – fürge ujjú
runner-up – második (helyezett)
Egy kis történelem:
On December 3, 1992, an engineer named Neil Papworth sent the very first SMS with “MERRY CHRISTMAS” on it, to his collegeagues at Vodafone in Great Britain. But it was 7 years later that texting really took off.
Why did it take so long? Because for the first 7 years, cell phone users could only send an SMS to someone using the same operator. It wasn’t until 1999 that short messages could be sent between different networks.
According to Andrew Bud, managing director of SMS transmission company mBlox, interviewed in the BBC, texting really only took off when it found its natural market — teenagers —attracted to pre-paid phones. “These pay-as-you-go users found their money went further with texting – which some networks originally neglected to charge for”.
The technology was actually created by an Anglo-Dutch information technology firm called CMG, as reported in The Guardian.
According to Cor Stutterheim from CMG, “It started as a message service, allowing operators to inform all their own customers about things such as problems with the network. When we created SMS (Short Messaging Service) it was not really meant to communicate from consumer to consumer and certainly not meant to become the main channel which the younger generation would use to communicate with each other,” added Stutterheim.
textually.org
