Coding

At the Sunday Times, Melissa Katsoulis has a good piece on David Chrystal's txtng: the gr8 db8:

When [Italians] want to text the common word per, meaning “for”, they use the “x” symbol - because the phonetic rendering of the multiplication sign is per. And although there is no letter “k” in the Italian alphabet, they have borrowed it from English to save time keying in che. So their word for “why”, perché becomes simply “xk”. This shows a sophisticated command of code-mixing.

And here's Jonathan Sale's take at the FT.