db5 wrote:WTFDTM?
Figure that one out. It’]
LMAO – means funny. Your ass is still on and you aren’t even laughing. Smiling or internally chuckling with no sound but LMAO - Not!
IMHO – means I think – and has noting to do with humility. Just state your opinion. You aren’t a teen-age texter and don’t need to adopt their jargon nor is any humility involved.
There are dozens of others I’ve run across but these two are the most prevalent and serve as prime examples.
Why have we adopted this meaningless Text-Speak?
Yes, I know it is designed to convey a message, which is not correct in simple terms, designed not to offend anyone and which requires fewer strokes (get there as fast as you can:eek: ). That could, and does have a double meaning. I just don’t have text shorthand for it.
To my knowledge none of those terms are new. Text-Speak, as you call it, is merely a sign of the normal human tendency to adapt to whatever circumstance it confronts. In this case what might be called internet shorthand which, BTW, took form very early into the emergence of the home computer becoming part of everyday life and was largely encouraged by even the earliest proponents of the technology’s developers. Nobody refers to a cathode ray tube anymore. They don’t even call them CRTs or screen but, rather, "
monitor.”
We shorten words and phrases because it’s more convenient for repeated use. Saving time during conversation or to save both time and space for written communication. Sometimes we make the adjustment just because it strikes us as amusing to do so or because it gives the subject a feel that fits whatever the current trend of human conversation might be.
International Business Machines Corporation became
IBM.
More recently this might be more readily influenced by the very nature of the subject. Computers, which were generally held to offer a faster route to whatever you were looking for or wanted to do naturally created a faster language. DDOS (Down and Dirty Operating System) became CDOS (renamed by Microsoft after Gates purchased, then slightly reengineered, DDOS), then, finally just DOS (People simply dropped the C because there wasn’t any A, B, or whatever else DOS to distinguish it from; making the C superfluous or, as that generation would see it, slower.)
This seeming
trend has long existed. How many people do any of us know who will still say that they drive an
automobile, watch
television or listen to
Compact Discs?
Internet shorthand is just a continuation of what humanity has always done with language — Alter it to suit our level of familiarity with a term, phrase or concept.
