The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Texting, LOL, Leet and More
Back to the future

Can you read this? If you send a lot of text messages through your mobile phone, I’m sure you can. If not, it probably looks pretty peculiar. Many people (well, let’s face it, adults) look at text messages and think: “Hey, these kids don’t know how to spell or write.” But it’s a lot more inventive than that.

The words in text messages have a lot in common with the words you find in Internet slang and Internet languages, like LOL (Laugh Out Loud) or Leet, or other ways people communicate through the computer or game consoles. Although it seems very new and modern, quite a lot of the tricks of this sort of writing have actually been around for years—centuries, even. Have a look for yourself:

* leaving out vowels (a, e, i, o, u), like bn for “been” or fst for “fast.” Well, remember originally the alphabet had no vowels.

* changed or shortened spelling, usually so the word is written as it’s spoken, like cud for “could” or vzt for “visit.” People have been wanting to change spelling like this for ages.

* using little punctuation and few capital letters, like wnt 2 go 4 pza. Well, in the beginning English didn’t use either of these things anyway.

* using numbers or letters that sound like words instead of the word itself. So B4for “before” or L8for “late,” CU for “see you.” That’s something as old as the hills—remember the rebus?

* acronyms, like ttyl for “talk to you later” or bff for “best friends forever.” Even the ancient Romans used acronyms.

* clipping words, either at the beginning, like lo for “hello,” or at the end, like rad for “radical.” We all use plenty of words like this already—just think of bus for “omnibus” or pop for “popular.”

* deliberate mistakes, like changing the grammar to make the text shorter, like i r for “I am”; or typing “own” as pwn on purpose, instead of by accident.

So as you can see, it’s the technology, the way the messages are sent, rather than the language that makes it so new. But it has given rise to some new forms of writing. Text poetry, for example. After all, the shortness of text messages calls for very concentrated ideas and images, rather like the traditional Haiku poetry of Japan. Works of Shakespeare and Dickens and even the Lord’s Prayer have all been turned into text language. And now novels written entirely in instant messaging have started to appear, such as ttyl and ttfn by Lauren Myracle—maybe you can find them in the library. Or why not try writing a text story or poem yourself?

In the meantime, can you work out what popular folk song the Word Snoop has “translated” into text?

Twinkle, twinkle ltl (*),

how I 1Dr wot UR. ^ abof d wrld so hI,

lIk a diamond n d sky.

Twinkle, twinkle ltl (*),

how I 1Dr wot U R.