Despite being surrounded by teens eight hours a workday and thus being in total immersion, I don't seem to have the lingo down pat. On those few occasions when I text somebody, I almost always spell out entire words, no matter how complicated they are and in spite of the fact I'm cursing at the tiny keyboard on my phone.
That keyboard? Still larger than a BlackBerry's. This being Waterloo, Ontario, the home of RIM, nearly every teen at work has a BlackBerry, and so I've played with one a bit. My thumb covers four keys. How anybody can type on that thing without the aid of a pin, I'll never know.
I can appreciate the need for abbreviation--kids think they live such hectic lives, after all--but some of the things that get abbreviated boggle the mind. Like "ily".
Does "ily" make your heart go pitter-pat? It should, because it means "I love you". Wow. You've saved all of five keystrokes and removed any trace of emotion from the three most emotion-laden words in the English language.
Related: <3
I see this in Facebook statuses all the time, and it still trips me up. "Lovely time tonight <3"...lovely time tonight, but less than three...huh?
Maybe I don't see the heart because, unlike the majority of the teen population, my head's not screwed on sideways. I've begrudgingly accepted the simple smiley :-) [or in my case, 8-)], on account of it's been littering the Net for more than twenty years now and doesn't seem to want to go away. But XD? What the hell is XD? (For any other adults that might be reading, it's a laughing face. See it? Me, neither. I see an X and a D. And if I turn my head ninety degrees, I can maybe grasp that the D is an open mouth, but what is a sideways X supposed to signify? And how come everybody else just automagically sees what they're supposed to, while I toddle along exing and deeing myself into a major headache?
The acronyms are spreading. You're apt to see OMG on the cover of Cosmo nowadays, which probably pisses off any atheist that reads Cosmo and incidentally should piss off anybody who doesn't want to sound like a dumb blonde. (That said, last year I ran across OMGWTFBBQ, which I thought rather inspired.)
And then there's number creep. I first saw this abomination in song titles: Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U and Avril Lavigne's Sk8er Boi (and by the bye, Avril, the word is "boy"). Do people still think they're being clever or something? It just reeks of high school (sample yearbook quote: "2 good 2 B 4 gotten")--and well maybe that shouldn't be surprising--these kids are in high school, after all--when I was in high school I couldn't wait to get out of it and didn't want anyone to know I was in it.
Words, damnit, I deal in words. I think in words, I speak in words, and I write words. In short, I appear to be a walking anachronism.
3 comments:
Oh you're not alone. I keep running into ZOMG and thinking, what the Frack is that?
That Cthulu for http://www.urbandictionary.com I almost use it more than Wikipedia (and after Google) to keep me up to date...
I use some of them like r = are u = you c = see stuff like that. Easier to type it out.
Speaking of teenagers... I was told by a co-worker that there are 13-14 year olds who are skipping school to have sex parties, unreal. I have not researched this 'hear se' yet but wow if it is true.
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