Omg, Enough With The Letters Already

This was an actual recent exchange between one of my daughtersand two of her friends on the Internet:

"BRB"

"IDC"

"UFO"

"Send me the link"

"KK"

Roughly translated, my daughter had to actually leave thekeyboard for a second and promised to be right back. Her frienddidn't care. Someone brought up the subject of flying saucers andwas told to provide an Internet link. She promised she would.

If that one complete English sentence hadn't been in there, Iwould have sworn the three merely had their hands positionedincorrectly on the keyboards and were typing gibberish.

But make no mistake, they were conversing all right andcomprehending each other perfectly at lightning speed.

With 82 million people texting regularly on cell phones, usinginstant messaging and spending time in chat rooms and the like, Iguess it only makes sense to devise a shorthand language for rapid-fire communication.

Call me an old fogey - in text shorthand you write it BHIMBGO(Bloody Hell, I Must Be Getting Old) - but I have an uneasy feelingabout this business of speaking in letters instead of words.

We're already losing the battle to get kids to read. Now we wantthem to bypass words and syntax altogether?

DITYID? (Did I Tell You I'm Distressed?)

I mean, how can we expect them to sit down and write expansivelyon a subject when their vocabulary consists of a helter-skelter mixof letters, with hardly any representing words of more than twosyllables?

How can we even get them to stop and ponder a thought when theybang away maniacally as if they're up against a 35-second shot clockin basketball?

My wife and dinner guest sought to dismiss my misgivings.

My friend suggested the initialisms-based language was merely aparallel universe and in no way hindered students' ability to learnto express themselves in broader prose. Relax, my wife said, "Kidsaren't using this for term papers. It's just a foreign language,like learning Greek or Hungarian. They're using it for the mediumfor which it was meant."

Our daughters don't have cell phones - and won't for a while! Butthey're picking up the lingo and using it, even in e-mails to DearOld Dad.

I asked one of them to list some of the shorthands she usesfrequently. She came up with a hefty list, some that I admit areeconomical and others that I found simply amusing:

TTFN (Ta-Ta For Now), 411 (Information), GR8 (Great), LYLAS (LoveYou Like A Sister) and OMGUG2BK (Oh My God, You Got To Be Kidding).

The girls know I'm leery. In that opening exchange in thiscolumn, I was so afraid UFO meant something inappropriate, a laAMRMTYFTS (All My Roommates Thank You For The Show). I grilled oneof their friends and hustled to the website www.netlingo.com to makesure it didn't have an ulterior meaning. I embarrassed them, ofcourse, just as I did the other day by using the word "dreamboat."They thought I was the one making up words and have had several LMHO(Laughing My Head Off) episodes since.

To be honest, both girls are voracious readers and are well abovegrade level in spelling and writing. One has started writing a half-dozen books.

Still, I wonder what path we are heading down with all thistruncating of language. But I will keep an open mind.

To use proper "netiquette," GTG (Got To Go). Not to be confusedwith GTGP.

acrable@lnpnews.com