Apocalypse Now! - The SMS Lingo

 

That outrage you feel when you see that weird combination of alphabets and numerals on your smart phone’s screen makes you wonder whether you really deserve that ‘smart’ phone. Merely, because you just can’t decipher that awkward looking code. The screen reads:

Gud n8  :-)
and it is from your new friend…ummm…girl ;)

Well…okay… although that ‘good’ reads like the Hindi word for jaggery…you could figure it out, but, what is that next word?

You decide not to ask the messenger, thinking that asking for the meaning of the message will put you in a mortifying situation, and who knows, what effect that might have on her opinion about you. After all you have just met. And what would you write?

“Erm…what does your message mean again? I am sorry but me being a coder doesn’t mean that I can ‘decode’ cryptic texts”

urghh…sounds blatantly awkward…and sheepish.

You give up, throw your phone by the bed side and lie down to try and sleep.
Just then…as if the Gods have suddenly bestowed you with brains, you are enlightened by a sudden realisation. It is a EUREKA moment for you. You sit upright and reply back:

Good night :-)

You have finally deciphered the code. You have a sound sleep there-on with ‘sweet dreams’.

Yes, it may have felt exaggerated, but this SMS lingo is getting illogical with every passing day.
I mean you have to merely twitch another muscle to write nite, instead of n8. Even ‘night’ wouldn’t have hurt. That sluggishness my dearie, to type two more letters or that excuse that you might just hurt your fragile fingers, has led to some big language disasters there.

The SMS lingo is replete with such cataclysmic spellings, making a new vocabulary of its own, and the fact that I, myself, am using the word ‘lingo’ instead of ‘language’ only re-enforces my statement. As if those abbreviations- which have now become universal with time, like TTYL, BTW, JK, IDK, LOL, ROFL, BRB, etc.- weren’t enough to fuddle our heads the first time we saw them, we now have landl9, f9, m8, n8 and other obtrusively bizarre collection of words. Even a ‘word’, by definition is a ‘meaningful’ collection of alphabets, and not numbers and alphabets together. That they aren’t meaningful, is another story altogether.

These ‘words’ btw…oops… by the way, don’t even sound right. F9? Seriously? Sounds more like a new version of the F1 racing to me!
Just a few days back a friend texted, ‘I’ll brb’, and I spent the entire evening figuring out if it meant ‘burp’ or ‘blurb’ or ‘burb’. Thankfully I asked and got to know it was the abbreviated form of ‘be right back’. Talk about annoying slangs.

What’s worse, we are all gradually getting so used to this ‘lingo’ that it subconsciously creeps in our professional writings, be it a cover letter, a resume, an application to a colleague or a client. The worst hit cohort is, however, that of the students. While the teachers toil hard to make them learn their spellings right, they scribble short forms and SMS abbreviations, owing to their habits of constant texting.

Another case in point of a language apocalypse was when one of my coolest friends, Priyanshi, and I started off with a debate on a social networking site (it is not unusual, trust me) and she wrote something like “IMO, blah blah blah..” For a long time I could not come up with a counter argument to her statement, not because I didn’t have one, but because I couldn’t think about anything but that strange unused abbreviation, IMO. For those who are like me and don’t know about it, it’s ‘In My Opinion’. It wasn’t her fault either. She had just managed to grab on that word like any other normal conversational word, and had ‘subconsciously’ written it down.
I can only suggest that since, now, network providers don’t charge by how long your SMS is, let’s revert back to a little close-to-normal-and-meaningful language, with limited abbreviations and spelling disasters, to avoid such language disasters.

Till the tym dat happens, I guess, I’ll brb with another blog post. You guys can always ‘like’, and ‘comment’ to reach me.
TTYL.
:)