text tennis
- noun
- Slang
:
tenis de texto
- After a misunderstanding, they cleared things up through some intense text tennis.
Examples
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She and her brother were locked in text tennis for hours, joking about their day.
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Our text tennis conversation lasted the entire train ride home.
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I love playing text tennis with my friend.
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Have you ever played text tennis?
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During their lunch break, they engaged in some quick text tennis to share updates.
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After the game, we continued our text tennis, exchanging funny highlights and photos.
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Their friendly text tennis made the long evening feel much shorter and more enjoyable.
Synonyms
49
1.8
Sending short written messages on a phone to someone
How Rapid
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound maps 'text' (message) onto 'tennis' (a back-and-forth rally), so an informed learner can infer a conversational, rapid exchange of messages; the mapping is metaphorical rather than literal. Because understanding requires mapping the sport metaphor to messaging (a common but not strictly compositional process), it is partially predictable but not fully transparent to a B1 learner without prior exposure.
Etymology
Text tennis may come from the image of text messages flying back and forth like a tennis game, with each person quickly 'hitting' a new reply. That's why it means 'a rapid back-and-forth exchange of texts'.