Illustration by Clara Nicoll
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“MERRY CHRISTMAS.” This was the first text message ever sent, from engineer Neil Papworth to his colleague Richard Jarvis in December 1992. Now, an estimated 23bn texts are sent worldwide every day.
Like Papworth, I also wished a bunch of my friends and family a merry Christmas over text last December. But, unlike Papworth, I would never dream of sending the angry, all-caps words “MERRY CHRISTMAS” or “Merry Christmas.” with a pointed full stop at the end of the message. Instead, I went for variations of “merry christmas!!!!” and “merry christmas xxx”.
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