fexting

The word came from the White House. “During the Obama years,” Harper’s Bazaar (opens in a new window) reported in May 2022, the Bidens “took to hashing out their occasional spats over text to avoid fighting in front of the Secret Service. (They christened it ‘fexting.’)” After one such message, she said, “Joe said, ‘You realize that’s going to go down in history. There will be a record of that.’” Cambridge Dictionary (opens in a new window) entered it 2 months later: “the act of fighting with someone by exchanging text messages rather than speaking on the phone or in person.”

The research had arrived first. In 2013 a study of 276 young adults at Brigham Young University (opens in a new window) reported, for women, that “Using text messages to apologize, work out differences or make decisions is associated with lower relationship quality,” and for men that “Too frequent texting is associated with lower relationship quality.” When the word arrived, a Relate counsellor told the Guardian (opens in a new window): “When you get a message, you don’t hear the quivering in their voice, the hurt. You might just see the anger.” He added that texts risk “memorialising” rows.

Under load, the argument acquires the property its first users noticed. It has a record. Each side drafts, revises and sends, and the other receives the anger without the voice it was said in. The tone is supplied by the reader, who is the person least likely to be generous with it. The exchange can be scrolled back to and quoted, and it is, months later, as evidence in a different argument.