BBCs, SPK TXT - It's not as hard as you think, IMHO

LAURI KUBUITSILE
Correspondent | Wednesday August 15, 2007 00:00

The very term SMS, which means short messaging system, a noun, is used without recourse by these folks as a verb as in 'SMS me' or  'I'm just SMSing someone'. This just goes to show the lackadaisical attitude of these folks to the norms of society and the basic long-standing rules of language. Learning to decipher these messages, though, is not impossible, BBCs need only to learn a few simple things.

One of the first problems encountered by BBCs is the reduction and sometimes complete disappearance of vowels. The English language has a reliance on vowels; they must be there. It was drilled in every school child's head from standard one onward. Only those cunning words that snuck in that ambiguous 'y' could get away without vowels. Sky, bye, sly - these we accepted for their quirkiness. But in text language, vowels seem to have disappeared. The written in stone grammar rule that all words have vowels seems to have been beaten into submission and kicked resolutely out the front door. Vowels are of no use and, in practice, a redundant burden. Losing them is the better route in the world of SMS's.  'At least' now becomes 'atlst' - two words, and, shockingly, no vowels at all.  'All the best' becomes 'ATB', typical woman, according to the SMS glossary at www.environmental-studies.de, becomes inexplicably 'X!' and typical man 'Y!'. 'Just' is 'js', 'something'= 'smtin', 'and' becomes 'n', 'TTYL' means 'talk to you later' and 'please'= 'Plze'.
Compounding this confusion, numbers which used to politely queue up in maths only, doing their prescribed job of adding, subtracting and, when really asserting their number-ness - dividing, have now jumped the lexical divide and in the world of text language take up whole syllables of words and, in other cases, stand in for the word itself. For example,  '4' stands in for the perfectly useful word 'for' and, after years of finally figuring out the difference between 'to' and 'too', the text language folk have thrown all of the hard work out of the window and replaced both words, irrespective of their grammatical use, with the number '2'. Whole sentences are reduced to a hodgepodge of letters and numbers. Examples - '2Ht2Hndl' , '2l8', '4yeo', '4e'. (Translation for BBCs - ' too hot to handle', 'too late', 'for your eyes only' and most surprising of all, ' forever')
Another bewitching part of text messaging is the use of words that we know, familiar words that suddenly transform into something all together different. For example, 'HAND'. From as far back as I  know it stood for that useful thing at the end of a human being's upper appendage, but now, in the wild and whacky world of SMS-ing, it apparently means 'have a nice day'. Or what about that lovely word, conjuring breakthroughs in back seats, bittersweet separations or joyous reunions, 'KISS', it no longer holds even a passing resemblance to its former meaning, in SMS-talk it means, 'keep it simple stupid'.
Punctuation marks, too, have taken on a whole new life in the world of text writing. They can assist letters to make pictures referred to as 'emoticons'. An example is a happy face, albeit still lying in bed, like this- :D. Alternatively, they can stand in for words as in the text sentence-
' Im :) 2hv mt U' which means 'I'm happy to have met you' with the colon and bracket combining to form the word happy, now not only vowels have been made redundant, the consonants have been booted, too.

In practice, text language seems to have its use. It reduces the keys one must punch on that blastedly small keyboard. It also saves money in sending the message. It seems alien and subversive to BBCs but it is not impenetrable. With a little effort sentences like-'RUOK' , 'MUSM', and 'ROFLOL' will have real meaning for the average BBC. (translated - 'Are you okay?', 'Miss you so much' and 'Rolling on the floor laughing out loud'). Soon the only fear will be that BACs (Born After Computers) will completely adopt this strange language. It is slowly seeping into mainstream society with the random 'l8t' in a professional letter or 'b4' in a school essay. BBCs must stand united to maintain the boundaries of acceptability. In real world writing, vowels are needed, numbers have their place and those confounded punctuation marks have no business showing emotion. Let's strive to keep it like that.