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To me, the idea that language can be purist is nonsensical; language always evolves, whether it's through technology — think emojis and textspeak — or increased social awareness, such as the evolution from "wife beating" to "intimate partner violence."

But the language shimmers most when it pivots between “lol” textspeak and the grandiloquent pronouncements that recall the Romantics.

Human emotion gets standardized into generic, two-character textspeak, but then turns, through Ms. Humphries’s lashing of oil paints through the stencil, back into lifelike form.

Even in longhand, he wrote in his signature style, an idiosyncratic precursor of textspeak that he’d perfected back in the eighties: “Eye” for “I,” “U” for “you,” “R” for “are.”

Procter & Gamble, the household products company, has applied to trademark acronyms common in textspeak including “LOL” and “WTF”.