<3… B4…LYLAS…TKU4UK

Translation: heart, before, love you like a sister, and thank you for your kindness, respectively. Would you have guessed that these seemingly random combinations of numbers and letters are just a few among hundreds of acronyms of text message lingo? I pulled these from Netlingo.com, which boasts the most extensive list of text message lingo, 95 percent of which I am completely unfamiliar. When I receive text messages from friends or younger family members comprised mostly of acronyms, I scratch my head, puzzled at what the message is supposed to say.    

For a long time, I was resistant to text messaging. I thought it was a waste of time. A simple phone call would take half the time to get to the point than a text messaging conversation. In fact, I was so resistant that until a few years ago, I didn’t even have a cell phone that enabled text messaging! And now, I find that I text more than I talk on the phone simply because people are more responsive to a text message.

However, my text messages are not cryptic codes of letters and numbers. Instead, they are grammatically correct and complete sentences. I have yet to give in to the LOL, BRB, TTYL and other acronyms. As a spelling and grammar nerd, seeing these acronyms and period-less sentences make me cringe.

What sparked this evaluation of my text messaging habits was an article I found while perusing through the day’s news online that took text messaging to a new level. The headline read “South Korea team wins text messaging world cup.” The LG Mobile World Cup Championships pitted 24 participants from 12 countries against each other in an intense competition of who could type phrases projected on plasma screens the fastest with no typos or abbreviations. The winning team from South Korea took home the championship title and $100,000. A new record was set by a 27-year-old from Portugal who typed a 264-character text in 1 minute and 59 seconds. I’m fairly certain I could only type a 100-character text in the same amount of time with several typos.

Fifteen years ago, I never would have guessed a phenomenon like text messaging would ever come to pass. Now, people are competing to be the most accurate and fastest of all the avid text messagers in the world. OMG!

 -Mary Nhotsavang

Trackback this Post | Feed on comments to this Post