By Ali Siemens (The Cascade) – Email
Date Posted: October 12, 2011
Print Edition: October 5, 2011
MSN Messenger was the k3wlest thing when it first came out (it really blew ICQ out of the water). The ability to sit behind your computer, dial up to the internet and send messages to friends that lived a few streets away was a great luxury. Just like every kind of technology known to mankind, MSN evolved and adapted new perks such as: adding emoticons to your chat messages, the ability to upload a picture of yourself to the chat window, as well as the option of turning on your one megapixel webcam to watch someone type. The possibilities seemed endless.
Along with the capability to talk to friends and family online, it also bred the SMS language (short message system). At 21-years-old, I am already out of the loop. I used terms like, “brb,” “g2g,” and “lol” back when I first started using instant messaging programs, but since then, the language has evolved to a point where I find myself lost and searching for the definitions of terms such as “lq2m” (laughing quietly to myself).
This secret language seems to revamp itself every few years, and in my early twenties, I feel as though I have already been left behind, left to commiserate with those still using dial-up routers and the rotary phone.
What does this mean for the poor parents of teenagers who are busy using their Blackberry messenger function all day? What does this mean for the English language? To me, it is not necessarily the short form of the language that irks me, it’s the loss of emphasis and meaning to words that used to hold such passion and weight. IMAO (in my arrogant opinion), situations of love and romance have not only been trashed and desensitized in the entertainment world, but heart warming phrases such as “I love you” have been reduced to, “LYLAB” or “LYLAS,” translating to “love you like a brother or sister.”
MSN is about as ancient as papyrus, now we have other media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The social media junkies have replaced their use of the English language with messages that appear in under 140 characters, or in Instagram’s situation, the only way to communicate is to upload a picture of what is going on in your life.
Can the language purists fight off these short form abbreviations or is it time they break in and join the online world of communication?
In any situation when a person is reading a book, newspaper or essay and they come across a word they do not understand, most people have been taught to crack out their dictionary and lookup the definition. Although your Webster’s dictionary may not hold the definition to “nifoc,” it is still important we know how people are communicating online. If at 21 I am already lost and confused by how some teenagers are communicating, I can only imagine how lost I will be when I have children of my own. In the case of “nifoc,” it’s probably pretty important for me to know if my son or daughter is “naked in front of computer.” I guess I’ll just have to introduce one of my own – WOEDTSF (What on Earth does that stand for)?!
