Something that we don't realize today is that the majority of us are fluent in another language that we see every day. Text lingo, online slang, call it what you want, but these abbreviations like 'omg', 'wtf', 'nm', or 'ttyl' were not always around.
I remember my mom called me a few weeks ago and asked me, "What does 'LMAO' stand for?" I laughed as anyone my age would, but looking back it makes me realize that it is like a foreign language to some people.
Almost everyone has those friends on a social network who TyP3 liik3 DiS && Itz s00 Ann0yInG! Or we may catch ourselves being lazy and abbrivating sentences like "OMG WTH!?!" And without even thnking twice, we can decode what someone is trying to say, or easily know the words of what each letter stands for.
25 years ago, no one would have known our slang and typing styles that we see and use today. But as fasicnating as that is, is that a good thing? I would say probably not. Multiple times I have heard teachers rant about how lazy we are getting when it comes to writing, and that the amount of spelling and grammar mistakes are increasing with each generation.
Possibly text lingo is to blame for this. Why would a 6th grader learn how to spell the word 'tomorrow' when online they just use 'tomm' or 'tmrw'? And maybe that's the most practice they get at spelling is through online socialization.
I think that the excuse used to be on our older cellphone we would have to press a button multiple times to get to certain letters and abbreviating was faster and more convienant. But why do we do it while on the computer? We have a whole keyboard there and pressing a few extra keys can take less than 2 seconds.
If we keep getting lazier and lazier each generation, will our writing and spelling suffer?
-Zaquisha
While I think this is incredibly annoying when people only talk like this, you bring up a great point. I honestly forget that this type of 'language' would be completely foreign to an older generation. It makes you wonder what our kids will talk like.
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