Call me old-fashioned (or a stickler for Associated Press style guidelines), but I must confess to having a hard time accepting the new language being used everywhere that I call "tweet-speak." This rushed, cryptic code does little to enhance understanding, enlist support and influence change. In my humble opinion (or IMHO for you text-aficionados), its only useful purpose is locating your friends in a crowd.
Whr u at?
Snck stnd.
Lev 1 r 2?
2.
K. Stay.
C u in 5.
Complex thoughts that require full, spelled out nouns, subjects, verbs, prepositional phrases, adjectives and other grammatical tools that enhance meaning aren't suited for tweet-speak. Although they're not likely to read it because it contains *gasp* actual paragraphs, I'm writing this post for a few of my friends who insist on conducting involved conversations via text. Try as I might, I cannot think of universally understood abbreviations for such feelings as apathy or irritation. (Hmm. Meh? Grrr? See, even those like me who try their best to resist tweet-speak can easily fall prey.)
To them, I'd like to text KIO (or knock it off)!
Give your thumbs a rest and call me. Better yet, find a real keyboard, lose the 140-character limit and email me. That way I can read and respond to your confessions, rants or random observations when it suits, not when you interrupt my search for a perfectly ripe cantaloupe at the grocery store. Just please, please stop making me interpret nonsensical text like "Hd bst sp at Ac. Wnt rec...do u hav?"
Have you decoded this message yet?
No?
I had to call my friend to find out what the heck she wanted. It turns out "she had the best soup EVER at the Acapulco Mexican restaurant and wanted the recipe, which she thought I might already have obtained."
Together we spent at least 20 minutes getting to the bottom of that urgent mystery. She could have spent 30 seconds sending me an email that I could have spent another 30 seconds answering. Twenty minutes of "convenient" tweet-speak or one minute of written dialogue involving actual words and punctuation.
IDK...u pck.
FF
There is a lot of noise out there too where people just say a random thing in a lame attempt to get attention. Sometimes it's just best to ignore those too.