fml...

Text messaging drives me nuts. Don't get me wrong! I don't own a brain-cancer-causing cell phone or smartphone or Blackberry thing or whatever. But I do live on email so all of my correspondence is typed which means subversives are typing back at me - in a different language. Most of the time I have no idea what they are saying.

Just before I quit teaching, kids started thinking it was cool to spell everything phonetically. Phat, anotha, shaddup, whatcha, biatch. Even that was easier than initials for each word. At least you could painstakingly sound out the gobbly-gook and still make sense of what someone was writing IF you read it really, really slowly.

Text messaging is a different language. Initials stand for whole words. It's a matter of keeping an urban dictionary at your side, look up each foreign letter combination, then memorize them. Heaven help you if the writer just can't spell. There are few I use myself, like: LOL, but even then I prefer hahaha, hehehehe, or HA!  I know BTW, but I do remember the first few times seeing it and wondering what it meant and then questioning why people were too lazy to spell by the way. It's not that long of a phrase. LMFAO. I know what that means, but again I opt for the ha-ha's. I know as much texting language as I do...Japanese.

It makes me ponder how text messaging will affect the literacy of children in the future? Many, many years ago I worked for an airline who used all kinds of initials for expedient communication. LAX, SFO, JFK...I had every major city in the world memorized, along with all kinds of abbreviations for common airline procedures. PNR, ETA, ETD, STDBY, KML...The longer I worked at that job, the worse my spelling became. A supervisor warned me that was just one of the disadvantages. Long term disadvantages. I never have fully recuperated. So what happens to this generation of children? Is it the start of a new language? Or the disintegration of the old one? It's bad enough the art of letter-writing is dead, but now whole words are disappearing. Forget sentence structure.

My sixteen-year-old niece emailed me a few weeks ago. I haven't had contact with her for a while so I was really excited.  Eager to get to know her teen-self, I emailed her what was literally a FULL page of questions and comments hoping she'd respond with information. Her response:

yeaschool2morowlistentomanypurple spagetti awh!...2cute

It looks like something a spammer would send. She sort of answered two questions from a list of twenty or so. I was disappointed to say the least. I wanted real dialogue. A friend of mine who has a teenager told me to be thankful I could make out whole words and she's meeting me halfway between full-blown proper English and texting.

A day later my niece writes:

freezing buslate fml

fml? fml?  I race to the online urban dictionary...fuck my life

You know, I have to say I like that one. I try to be positive, but that one has just enough cynicism and makes me laugh at the same time. It's reminds me of my best friend when I was a teenager. Every other sentence was Life's a bitch. Or if she was feeling particularly verbose, Life's a bitch and then you die.

At one point my niece ended a sentence with eorl and I raced to my urban dictionary unable to find it. I emailed her apologizing for my old age and my texting-impairment explaining I didn't understand. She must have felt badly for abusing the elderly for then she graced me with whole-ish sentences:

I think I meant something else don't worry I understand

She spelled the word wrong. HAHAHA, oops, I mean LOL.