Editorial: Txtspk mostly all gud

It appears to me the written language is dying a slow and painful death.

You only have to look as far as a cellphone, Twitter or a Facebook post to know what I'm talking about.

Text speak, or txtspk, has become a language of its own.

Words have had vowels dropped or numbers added to them for speed and the convenience of the modern day wordsmith.

I'm guilty of it myself, with only 140 characters available for a tweet and text or txt, depending on how you look at things. I'm totally for dropping a vowel just so you can send an instant message on your phone. Even the Maori language has been converted to txtspk - an example is 4re for whare.

Today's society is all about the hustle and bustle and being short and sweet but have we gone to the extreme and are we running the risk of losing the skill of spelling words properly?

A niece of mine sent me a txt the other day asking me - "How's it cuz?". I actually thought it was her mother accidentally using the wrong phone and I replied back asking - "Who's this?". I received the response - "It's me uncall".

You could imagine my surprise, first to think my niece had called me her "cuz" - then in the next txt, she had called me "uncall" instead of uncle!

I'm all for shortening words for the convenience but I'm baffled by the fact my niece replaced the word uncle with the six-letter 'word' uncall!

Unfortunately abbreviated slang appears to be here to stay so I'll just have to GOI (get over it).