“Turn that down!”, “I can’t believe you listen to that garbage!”, “You call that music!”, “Because I said so!”. Do you find yourself saying these things to your kids? Sound familiar? My transformation is complete; I’ve finally turned into my parents!
One thing my parents didn’t have to contend with was texting. Although I don’t mind the actual act of texting too much, the deciphering of the actual message itself takes me longer than writing it. My teenager has even taken to verbalizing textspeak in her daily life. She’ll say “LOL” instead of actually laughing at something. That can get annoying.
I can see it now. Someday, in the distant future, archeologists will find caches of old cell phones and will resurrect them from their discharged state. Their inboxes will be scoured for clues of our now ancient civilization. They will dance around excitedly and exclaim “U-rka! I fnd it! for you see, their version of the U.S. constitution will be a .PDF, and start off like this:
“We d ppl of d Untd st8z, n rdr 2 frm a mo prfct Union, Stblsh Jstc, N-sr dmstk Trnqlty, prvd 4 d comnN dfnce, …….”
By finding the cache of old cell phones they will finally have found the missing link between their language and ours (English).
TTFN D4D rdrs!
Fifteen years (or so) ago, Bowling Green State University in Ohio used to allow courses in FORTRAN to satisfy the foreign language requirement for graduation. I can’t help but wonder if soon you’ll be able to major in “license plate”.
I don’t want to think how long it took you to translate the preamble…
@Patrick,
Sadly, I found many textspeak Translators, and Generators, on the internet. This “fad” is here to stay.
On a similar vein as the Fortran comment, UC Berkley had Ebonics as a course to satisfy a language requirement. “What’s next?” indeed!
Soooo funny, and Soooo true!! We’ve had that conversation around here, too, how real language will be obsolete someday. We were also talking about how I can’t write anymore…like, with a pen and paper. My fingers get tired so quickly, and my writing is horrendous! It’s lack of practice. I don’t really write anymore…I type everything!!! Great post, as usual!
LOL…wait I mean, I was laughing that your daughter says ‘LOL’