Text Speak

You see it everywhere. Acronyms and "initialisms". LOL for "Laughing out loud", CU for "See You", IDK for "I don't now", BFF for "Best friend forever." They're like a plague. What started out as a cyber-oriented "shorthand" of sorts has evolved into a whole new monster. What was once reserved for the computer geeks and online communities has infiltrated cell phone text messages, emails and, dare I say it, every day conversations.

If you speak with a teenager, or young adult, today, they are well versed in "Text-Speak" and will defend it like our parents defended Elvis Presley and Rock-n-Roll. "You just don't understand it," they'll say. "It makes it easier to have a conversation," they'll argue. "Times change, you need to catch up," they'll respond.

Granted, as a tool to send a text message, where the amount of characters you're allowed to use are severely limited, I can see the use of text-speak. Even in an instant message it is, at times, acceptable. Who HASN'T typed out "LOL" at least a few hundred times to convey laughter at the other person's comments in an instant message? But there comes a time when text-speak needs to be put on the back shelf.

In my professional career, I cannot tell you how many resumes and applications I've gotten that contained text-speak. Emails from my nieces and nephews that take me, quite literally, three times as long to read because I'm trying to decipher this new-age code.

My own personal opinion of text-speak is, outside of a very limited appropriate use (Cell phone text messages, Instant message conversations), it gives the first impressions of a very lazy person. How hard is it to type out "Text" instead of "txt"? You're only dropping one letter! When someone types the number "4" instead of writing out "for" or the letter "U" instead of "you" it's like nails on a chalkboard for me. They're words, not single letters, not numbers, they are WORDS.