Posted on 02/09/2011 8:35:25 AM PST by MNDude
NEW YORK (AP) - "ILY!" Susan Maushart's 16-year-old daughter often calls out over her shoulder as she leaves the house. Sure, actual words would be better. But Mom knows not to complain.
"A mother of teenagers is pathetically grateful for an 'I love you' no matter what form it takes," she observes.
Then there are the various forms of "LOL" that her teens use in regular parlance - it's become a conjugable verb by now. And of course, there's the saltier acronym used by son Bill: "WTF, Mom?!" But before you judge, note that former VP candidate Sarah Palin just used that one in a TV interview. And CNN's Anderson Cooper used it on his show the other night.
Acronyms have been around for years. But with the advent of text and Twitter-language, it certainly feels like we're speaking in groups of capital letters a lot more. It's a question that intrigues linguists and other language aficionados - even though they'll tell you they have absolutely no concrete research on it.
"It's fascinating," says Scott Kiesling, a socio-linguist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. "What's interesting to me as a linguist is figuring out which words get picked up, and why. What is it that makes OMG and WTF and LOL so useful that they spread from the written to the spoken form?"
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.myway.com ...
“OMG, when did we start talking like txt msgs?”
Wild guess: when we started texting.
IDK.
WTF?
Laziness is at the root of all changes in language.
Almost in every business meeting our staff has I ask people to write in complete sentences, it appears to be a lost form.
Don’t AXE me.
you just have to adapt. I let my kids know when I am speaking in ALL CAPS!
I think some of the devolution in culture actually takes a lot more energy than being normal.
Example: Wearing pants down to your knees means you’ll have to walk around like a penguin all day to keep your pants up, as well as constantly pulling them up. I don’t get it.
“Laziness is at the root of all changes in language.”
Bingo! I detest the butchering of the English language.
That was Barack Obama’s WTF moment. Sarah just pointed it out—and probably killed (if you’ll pardon the metaphor) Obama’s plans to introduce a spiffy new phrase to characterize his regime, in the tradition of the New Deal or the Great Society.
I suspect that Win the Future is now defunct.
I twice asked my wife’s niece to quit emailing me in texting style (I disabled real texting apps) and she completely ignored the requests. I don’t even (attempt to) read them or even open them now. I guess the kids don’t really care if anyone reads their messages or not. Just send out stupid tweets and go back to MTV on the iPhone.
Ysrdy
I’ve believed for some time this was going to ultimately destroy the English language
WTFPWND!!!
I'm sure that someone from the 1880s would feel exactly the same way about your use of the language. I believe 'butchery' would have been the prefered form.
/johnny
Correct...this started ages ago in internet gaming...called “L33T” speak...
About the time we started keeping up with hugh, series news whilst in the shower.
I must be living in a cocoon. We have two teenage sons, both of whom text. I’ve never heard them or their friends talk in ‘text’. They write it, which saves them keystrokes, but they don’t say it.
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