The Social Life: Spelling, grammar do not need to disappear

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

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