Tynonym

The Tynonym or T9onym is a brand spanking new morphological process that stems from the use of mobile phones and the T9 predictive text method when typing SMS messages.

Take out your cell phone now. Open a new text message, and turn your dictionary on. Now hit 2665. You should end up with book. Am I right? Now tab through the rest of the phone’s suggestions. Cool and cook, that’s all mine found. So, the word book’s tynonyms are cool and cook. Simple, isn’t it?

So what’s the significance of this, you ask? Well, there is evidence that word substitution is happening in real life. A little like cockney, it seems that people are substituting these tynonyms for the real word. The Wikipedia entry for the T9onym, although now removed (reportedly due to yet another edit war) spoke of teenagers in the UK who were using book instead of cool. In fact, a little bit of googling turned up this fantastic first hand account of the phenomenon.

My sister Anna’s new nickname is Bomb. Type it find out. You probably guessed already.

And kids (and Media Types from London) are telling me my blog is totally Book. WHAT? Here’s the great new thing. Because ‘Book’ comes up before the word ‘Cool’ on T9, effectively kids are now re-associating the ‘Signified’ – our perfect Platonic notion of ‘Cool’ – with a signifier that shares no traditional meaning derived from existing language, but jumps to another (almost) randomly associated signifier – simply because of T9 associating them through structural similarities.

As noted by this blogger, the most important aspect here is the dramatic deviation from the norm in the construction of sign and signifier. The association here between book and cool is not physical, logical or idealogical. It is purely structural. In reality, this is no stranger to us. We often make structural associations in our mind. For example, I might unconsciously associate interesting with condescending because they both have the -ing suffix. However, I would probably never use them interchangeably in a sentence. Semantics just wouldn’t allow it.

Thus, tynonyms are important in the fact that the strange associations made as a result of them are having a sociological impact on language. These weird lateral associations are being used by people. Now here’s an area of research that could use some focus over the next few years. As phones get better at implementing predictive text, will tynonyms become less of a factor?

Honestly, what will tie future hole?