Acronym Nation!

Take a look around. How many lols, omgs and wtfs do you see. A few? Now check your text messages. Oh yeah, there are a lot, unless of course you are prim and proper and use full words and sentences while texting. I know that I do not. I find it amazing how we speak, type, write and text in several different languages.

If we were standing face to face right now, you would say, "You speak much differently than you write." That is a true statement. I also text very differently than how I speak and write. My job entails sending a lot of emails to customers. The emails sent early in the morning are typically more fluid and read very nicely. Towards the end of the day they tend to become very "texty". lol. I get in a hurry for no reason and tend to start getting more lazy and the quality of my writing and thought process begins it's downward spiral.

Has texting made us lazy and affected how we write? Have we become so used to using acronyms that we do not remember how to write a complete sentence? I would hate to be a literature teacher that had to correct papers. I am sure that it can be very frustrating. If there are any literature teachers reading this, let me know what you think about this topic. Has text affected how your students write their papers?

As I am writing this I can't help but think about how communication has changed over the centuries. The Romans sent a page to deliver a message. The civil war soldiers wrote in a diary. WWI soldiers sent messenger pigeons with notes. Vietnam soldiers used giant cell phones. Now you can facebook the entire world from the middle of the desert. lol. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. We also write much differently than we did from just a few hundred years ago.

Think about some of the letters that you hear on the History channel from people in the 1800s. They sound very romantic and literate. Now we don't write letters. We send text, emails or skype. I can not remember the last time that I actually wrote or typed a letter to someone. It was probably when I was in elementary school before the internet really took off and cellphones were huge bricks that were connected to a 20 pound bag full of electronics.

I hope that our youth understands that texting is a separate language from proper English. I really hope that Webster does not declare texting acronyms as words of the English language. I am sure that wikipedia has already added them. WTF is happening to our world? lol. j/k