One of our readers was a bit more forthright than I when it came to asking about acronyms on our Facebook page.
We see them all the time, in texts, in Facebook statues and on Twitter. Some are creeping into verbal speech, such as lol (laugh out loud) and WTF.
I am of a rare breed who likes to spell everything out in full, I confess to using LOL perhaps once or twice in my 13-year texting history.
One of my favourite comments to our question was this: TEXT TALK MUST DIE = text talk must die. This particular reader is another in the same category as I - punctuation, spelling and grammar do not need to fall by the wayside just because you are using an electronic device.
I admit to struggling to read a lot of the comments we get on our page simply because people resort to using text speak, sorry, that should be txt spk.
It's strangely ironic that I use shorthand in my work and that is essentially removing vowels when scribbling notes. But give me a keypad or keyboard and I struggle to replicate the same shorthand in type.
Some people use the same amount of letters in the real word but swap letters around, the Z is a popular replacement for an S and I wonder why they would do that. And what's with dis and dat and dey?
Some texters like to miss out punctuation, such as the apostrophe (dont, wont, couldnt etc) and others have no commas or full stops which makes it a mission to try to read all in one breath. Phew.
So what were the most common abbreviations our readers liked to use?
CU - crack up K - okay ILY - I love you IKR - I know right IYKWIM - if you know what I mean Idk - I don't know TGIF - thank god it's Friday SALTS - smiled a little then stopped FOCROFLMAO - falling off chair, rolling on floor, laughing my ass off CMUL - crack me up laughing LOL - laugh out loud TBH - to be honest IMHO - in my honest opinion TBF - to be fair 2more - tomorrow <3 - heart AFAIK - as far as I know IRL - in real life CYL - see you later PM - private message
