Conversation with a former linguist.

Me: I'm inboxING you!

Linguist: no you're not! I hate you and your murder of the english language. Also missed you today in rom fem rev lect. you would have liked it. x

Me: Yeah I would have liked to make an appearance but i spent the afternoon cleaning my room and reading d.h lawrence (ick. he's so freaking elitist! but slightly funny).

The English language is perpetually changing. Stop holding onto a romanticised notion of language and embrace utterance.

Me: p.s: 'rom fem rev lect.' talk about bastardising the English language..

Linguist: I'm just contracting words. I'm not turning a noun into a verb

Me: I'm going to hold on to inboxing for the rest of my life. Why aren't you inboxing whomever came up with the word 'texting'?

Linguist: nice correct usage of "whomever".

The thing is, you're not sending me an inbox. If you were I wouldn't have a problem with you saying "inboxing". The inbox doesn't change. you're PMing me. See that's fine.

I'm just upset because I had to put up with a bunch of teenagers on the way to wang "inboxing" each other, then talking about it, then updating their statuses and saying "like my status!". They were taking up the whole carriage and i got really grumpy. The icing on the cake was when one girl said "I have five inboxes! I'm so popular!"
I wanted to kill her. She may have five inboxes -- if she has four other email accounts as well as her facebook account, for example -- but I'm pretty sure that's not what she meant.

But it's one thing to hear it from ignorant teenagers and another from an intellectual equal.

Me: That teenager sounds like a genius! She knows how to embrace postmodern linguistics.

Just kidding, you have a point. PMing is probably correct. But I like the idea of social networking warping our language. Im holding onto inboxing.

Linguist: I wouldn't expect anything less from you :)