I H8 This Nu Txt stuff!

I h8 this nu txt stuff. Perhaps that means I’m old, or perhaps it means that I am old-fashioned, bordering on anal retentive, but when I have to spend twenty minutes trying to think of what the newest combination of letters stands for, it makes me really not give a damn about what is being said. This cannot be a good thing for society. We already are indifferent enough to each other; writing all our correspondence as if we were making vanity license plates could really lead to disaster.

A guy collapses. Someone screams that you should see if he has any ICE. Does that mean I should run to the closest bar, perhaps toss back a few shots while I wait for them to fill up my bucket of frozen water – not that ice would make a damned bit of difference to the situation, but what the hell do I know?

With age, our interpretation of these little language shortcuts will be vastly different. The first time I saw a FFS, I was thinking ‘finally finished shaving’. Seriously, it’s not such a simple task as we get older and have hair growing where it shouldn’t be – and not nice hair, at that. As I am inundated with TWSS, WWJS, IDK, AFK and the descriptive (although hyperbolic) ROFLMAO, I long for a simple FUBAR and SNAFUs of old.

While this was challenge enough, now let us add the always-enjoyable auto correct for texting. Taking us to places we never thought possible, in what is quickly becoming an illiterate society, technology now makes us speak better, more correctly... or at least gives us a few more laughs. As already discussed in a previous blog, though, at our age sometimes those outbursts of laughter are not such a good thing. How the little robotic brain inside these autocorrect programs can take plans and turn it into a penis, is truly amazing, while having the added benefit of creating some more than awkward situations.

Remember those days when you wrote a note to pass in school? Even on a crumpled piece of paper that had passed through ten sets of I-don’t-want-to-know-where-they’ve-been hands was fully understandable when it reached the end of the line, or when the teacher intercepted it. Remember when you didn’t have to scratch your head for ten minutes trying to understand if your son was going to be home for supper or not? There was also the old cork board on the kitchen wall for messages to be posted – and you could read them, despite the chicken scratch, with no problem even when the power was out or you hadn’t charged your batteries.

I can’t help but wonder if kids even know how to hold a pen, or can read cursive writing anymore. Why do they have to? Do they still teach spelling in school, or is the language growing so fast, it is outgrowing us all? The great thing about it, though, especially as senility sets in, is that we can get countless hours of entertainment, trying to understand what our children just told us (while praying that it isn’t a call for urgent help), and we can now make up any old letter combination on the Scrabble board, because who is going to know if it’s a real word or not? Certainly our texters of today won’t cotton on too quickly. Soon we will all be talking a language totally foreign to our children, one with words that actually mean something. My JFK will refer to the former president, not that I was making a joke (with an expletive in the middle), and I will never order anyone to STFU unless they are going to St Francis’ University. I’ll leave all that other BS for the fast-fingered set.