Can You Decipher This?

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If you can understand that lingo, you are a text message pro! I had to use the acronym dictionary to come up with these abbreviations, which mean, “Correct me if I’m wrong, text message is (I didn’t know the short for that) genius in my not so humble opinion but you knew that, that’s all for now.” Wow! This is a whole new language created out of convenience and necessity for those who text with their phones because you are only allowed to type so many characters at one time. I guess you could call it a new shorter short hand. I would need to keep my acronym dictionary handy to understand, but I suppose, as with any language, the more you speak it, or write it, the more fluent you become.

Kris Axtman, writer forThe Christian Science Monitor, writes the following about text lingo

Need a translation? Not if you’re a 13-year old who’s been Internet-connected since birth. For the rest of us, welcome to the world of Net Lingo-the keyboard generation’s gift to language and culture. “sup” is not a call to supper, buy a query: “What’s up?” And Josh’s “n2n” reply? “Not too much.”

It seems that teenagers have always had their own little language, but this is different, much more extensive. Should we be concerned? As I said earlier, I don’t think so, but there are many more who believe we should. Axtman writes

As in every age, teenagers today are adapting the English language to meet their needs for self-expression. But this time, it’s happening online-and at lightning speed. To some, it’s a creative twist on dialogue, and a new, harmless version of teen slang. But to anxious grammarians and harried teachers, it’s the linguistic ruin of Generation IM (instant messenger).

In her article, Axtman quotes a mother of two teenage sons who identifies some positives and negatives of instant messenging

Instant messaging has just replaced the phone … for their generation . . . she has noticed that her oldest son, who’s normally quite shy around girls, feels more comfortable talking to them online-a positve, she thinks. A negative, though, is that their grammar is becoming atrocious, and Net lingo is starting to show up on school assignments: they talk with these abbreviated words and run-on sentences with no punctuation. I call it speed talking, and it’s starting to carry over into their homework. 

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Teachers and grammarians are concerned about Net lingo, while linguists seem to be fascinated by it. If it really is spilling over into formal writing assignments, perhaps we should be concerned about it. In an article in The Washington Post, Lori Arantani writes about one teacher’s solution to the problem

A few years ago, after several weeks of grading papers filled with IM-speak and other jargon, Goodman took matters into her own hands. When the students showed up for class the following day, she asked them to read a paragraph she had written using many of the same phrases they used in their papers.

The paragraph was about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The teacher said the kids laughed but understood her point. In her article, Arantani quotes teacher Liela Christenbury

In some ways, IM is an English teacher’s dream because it’s using writing for a real purpose, towards a real audience, and that’s something we always struggle with in a classroom

I find it interesting that writing has always been a derivative of speech. People could talk long before they could write. Children learn to speak naturally, but generally don’t learn to write until they go to school. Is this new Internet language going to be the opposite? It has taken a written form and, while we may say TGIF, for “thank God it’s Friday,” or TMI for “too much information,” I don’t hear people saying “IYKWIM” for “if you know what I mean.” Perhaps that will happen eventually. I’m anxious to hear what others think about this topic.

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