The world was stunned when young people abbreviated countless languages in the world in order to fit an entire thought into a short 160 character TXT message when cell phones first came out. Years later, and the language is getting re-invented and updated with every single day. So much so, that many young people and even some adults have started incorporating the new abbreviated ‘slang’ into their every day lives.
I’ve broken down TXTing into three groups. There are three types of abbreviations you need to know about to be completely ‘down’ with the ‘happs’ (happenings) of the world.
Let’s take a wee journey into the world of TXTing…
Use Less Vowels
To those who think that the new TXT language is an insult to language, what if I told you this is just a re-invention of what used to exist? I’m not languages expert, but as an example, in the olden days in Russia, words were usually written without vowels to save space, time, and, in general, people saw no use for vowels when a word was blatantly obvious. Apart from a few abbreviations that require serious decoding from those outside of the ‘know’, TXTing is usually a language of words with the least amount of vowels as possible. With this knowledge in mind, next time instead of wasting precious space, and where the context allows, you can simply TXT ‘wer’ instead of where, were, we’re, we are…and so on. Instead of ‘about’ you can write it how you hear it and say ‘bwt’ or ‘abt’.
Some other examples…
Then = Thn
Night = Nyt
Time = Tym
Afternoon = Arvo
Between = btwn
Replace Words with Numbers
So you’ve learned how to TXT with as much abbreviation of letters as possible. Great. To save even more space and time you can start replacing letters with numbers. If in any word you hear anything that sounds like a number, replace it!
Let’s start with ‘tomorrow’ – we hear a ‘2’ in the first part of the word, so if we substitute this in, we come up with ‘2morrow’. Now using the rule of abbreviating as many vowels as possible, we narrow the word down to ‘2mrrw’. Seeing as it’s obvious to read, we’re completely safe chucking out the extra ‘r’ to make ‘2mrw’. Now, if you’re really savvy with your TXTing and know the other person will understand the word in the context you wrote, you are completely allowed to abbreviate it even more to ‘2m’. Look at that! We just turned an 8 character word into 2!
What are some other words…
Forgot/forget (depending on context) = 4gt
Before = b4
Late = L8
Tonight = 2n/2nyt
Use Acronyms
There are particular groups of words that young people use alot, so what’s the point spelling a whole bunch of words out when you can come up with an acronym? Here are some of the recently widely used and popular acronyms of young people around the world…and parents, please remember ‘wtf’ does NOT stand for ‘Welcome To Facebook’.
g2g = got to go/gotta go (usually used instead of the old ‘cya’ when we’re leaving a conversation)
brb = be right back
atm = at the moment
tbh = to be honest
btw = by the way
fml = f*** my life (showing the teen hormones, showing that the tough teen life is really getting to them)
wtf = what the f*** (usually used in context of confusion)
lol = laugh out loud/lots of laughs/(or can SOMETIMES mean)lots of love
lmao = laugh my ass off (when someone says something REALLY funny)
And one last piece of decoding…
Unrelated to TXTing, but you may come across usually in chat rooms when someone is telling the community about something really cool they did/saw/made, and someone says “Pix or it didn’t happen”…is basically to say the story sounds unbelievable and if the storyteller doesn’t have a photo to prove it, they’re lying.
So with all this new valuable knowledge in mind, what’s a word or abbreviation you’ve decode recently that you saw or heard a young person TXT, Facebook or even say in a face-to-face conversation?