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| In this age of saving time and making things run more efficiently, we frequently adopt methods and ways of trying to squeeze just a little more out of what we have.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend on message boards and chat channels and clients that has really started to bug me. It's a simple thing, but most people who do this are either just swept into it by seeing everyone else do it, or they just don't care enough to represent themselves with fully typed words. I'm talking of the use of single or severely shortened abbreviations in place of actual words. While this may make sense if I'm trying to cram a longish word into something more readable, like - Trinitrotoluene is shortened to TNT, it most certainly does NOT apply to simple words like "you" and "are". I don't expect everything that people type online to be an essay, some multi-page term paper. I just want to be able to read what you're typing in the format or "protocol" that everyone else uses. Most people don't consider typing "u" as a big timesaver over the normal word "you". It may seem like I'm being nitpicky, but it grates against my intelligence meter when I see these things online. There's another thing to consider. Most things you post online are now being auto-archived by the search engines that populate the web. If I'm applying for a job, or doing something that would cause someone to check me out online, it is very likely some of this stuff could make it into one of these archives. Do you really want your reputation to be distilled into a message like "u r kidding! Those ppl r so dumb! LOL!". I sure wouldn't. I know that language evolves and new meanings are constantly barraging the language like a cloud spreading into a anvil-head at the face of an atmospheric boundary, but I think we have to draw the line at the dubious savings of "u" versus "you". My final point - when you are typing in a chat "room", IRC channel, web message board, your words are your character. They tell people a little about yourself, how you compose your thoughts, what your logic is like. The last thing you want to do is convey the message that you're a lazy sub-human acronym machine. I'm done, thanks for reading... desiato_hotblack @ hotmail.com |
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