You know it’s time for a new phone when it starts calling people randomly. They call this “pocket dialing,” or “butt-dialing” depending on how close you like to keep your device to your derriere. Mine does it so often, it’s clear that this $5 Tracfone contraption is slipping into the electronic equivalent of old-age dementia. It happened most recently on a jaunt through Portland’s Monument Square; I dug it out and noticed it was in mid-call with a mysterious “someone.”

“Someone” texted me minutes later: “Who is this? I just missed a call from this number.”

A reasonable question. “This is Jeff,” I texted back. “Sorry, I must have pocketdialed you by mistake.”

“Oh,” was the reply. “Well I don’t know you.”

Yeesh. “Someone” likes to cut right to the meat of it.

At least that was the impression. But that’s the fundamental problem with texts: Since the point is to bang them out quickly, you don’t have time to do any real writing.” In other words, you don’t sit there tweaking the language so that everything has tone and context. “Well don’t know you” seems like terse statement, but maybe wasn’t intended that way. Given the limitations of the format, there’s no real way to tell.

Emoticons and emojis are attempt to address this. In case you’ve spent the past several years making spearheads out rocks in a South American jungle, emoticons are facial expressions you make using the symbols on your keypad; “:-)” a smiley face, “:-(” is a frowny face, and “:-O” means you’ve just walked in on two grizzly bears making love in a subway terminal. Emojis are the next phase of this unholy evolution, replacing the keyboard symbols with simple graphics, apparently to save users the trouble of typing in three whole keys with the shift button down. I mean heck, we’re not athletes, right?

I get why these symbols exist. Without them, a lot of these messages would lack emphasis, and we, the recipients, would be left squinting at our screens to tease out the author’s intent. They’ve become a sad necessity in a world that values pictures over words, cartoons over language. In the battle for self-expression, composing our thoughts is losing out to yellow faces giving thumbs-up gestures and winking in creepy fashion, like high-powered Wall Street shakers or construction site chauvinists. We’re losing our narrative.

Surely the pace of modern life has something to do with this. Our days are packed with details, most of them small, but all vying for snatches of our time – emails, texts, calls, Facebook posts, archery practice and ear hair grooming among them. (Some are more specific to our lives than others.) As a people, we no longer have the luxury to lick the tips of our quill pens and scribble out eloquent missives to friends and relatives. In the early days of this country, a relatively short 200-plus years ago, “Well I don’t know you” would have been written as, “I admit I am altogether unfamiliar with your personage, so please forgive my inability to ascertain your identity.” Wordier, but if John Adams had written it, he surely wouldn’t have felt the need to draw a cartoon of a man shrugging his shoulders in confusion. He also wouldn’t have been butt-dialed from a cellphone, but you see what I’m driving at.

Not that there’s anything wrong with expedience, per se, but when abbreviations, colloquialisms and general informality infiltrate the common vernacular, it spells doom for the language. It cripples our ability to effectively communicate ideas. To illustrate this, let’s contrast public statements from two disparate political figures – one from the 19th century, and one from the 21st. In 1863, during the height of the Civil War, the Union suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Gettysburg, spurring a patriotic resurgence that would ultimately lead to victory. Shortly after the battle, on the field where scores had been slain, President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most eloquent and stirring speeches in American history. He said, in part:

“(I)n a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Now here’s a 2006 quote from Donald Trump: “Rosie O’Donnell’s disgusting both inside and out. You take a look at her, she’s a slob. … I mean she’s basically a disaster.”

I’m not saying our texting culture was directly responsible for this pitiful linguistic decline. But it didn’t help.

If language is how we communicate, then our very ability to exchange thoughts and ideas is in jeopardy. Brevity has its place, but sometimes more is needed. If the trend continues, there may come a day when we encounter a texting, smileyface sending millennial, utter to them a sentence containing more than five words, and watch in disappointment as their attention span turns to dandelion spores, scattered by the faintest breeze.

“Well I don’t know you,” they’ll say to us vapidly. And then they’ll walk away.

— Jeff Lagasse is an editor at a Portland media company.