2 B or Nt 2 B?

Going along with my previous Book Bench stolen post, an my love for conversing about the deterioration (or, ahem, development) of language, here is a brilliant effort from folks writing in with their text versions of novels:

Last week, we asked readers to e-mail us their text-message versions of great works of literature. We couldn’t quite decipher all the entries we received, despite consulting individuals half our age, but there were a number of laudable efforts. Among our favorites was this distillation of Herman Melville’s tale of the proto-slacker Bartleby the scrivener, penned—er, thumbed?—by Kate Laubach, of upstate New York. Note the woeful exclamation points:

Bartleby prfrs nt 2. B frm DedLetrOfice. !B! !Humanity!

Will (no last name proffered), of Brooklyn, while noting that his usual text messages were “in full sentences and take about twenty minutes to write,” entered the fray with this supremely abbreviated “Waiting for Godot”:

W8ing 4 GDot
2 erly 4 mtg… …what mtgâ WTFá LOL…

And then brought to heel the mammoth “Ulysses”:

UlisEs
IRl& 6-16-04:
DDlus@home, @wrk, @sea.
LBlum: 1dering ju, crzy odSE 2.
MBlum: yes

CliffNotes, en garde.