The world is becoming more and more involved in writing shorthand recently, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of technology. Twitter is praised for requiring users to post their complete thoughts on any given situation with only 140 characters, far less than would be required by a common English sentence. This new SMS service has been skyrocketing in popularity, and has overtaken blogs (with no character limit) and facebook status updates (with a 350 character limit), and is forcing more and more of our “texting vocabulary” to come into play.
Not knowing the difference between “lol” and “rofl” and “roflmao” is now leading to an inability for many who have not embraced the new social media revolution to be incapable of communicating at all via these new services. So if you haven’t already done so, make sure you start building your texting vocabulary so you don’t become a dinosaur.
Your Basic Texting Vocabulary
When something is funny, you will often see “lol” (laugh out loud), “rofl” (rolling on the floor laughing, used for extremely funny things), and “roflmao” (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off), or simply “lmao” which is the final four words of the previous. “Idk” (I don’t know), “bc” (because) and “wk” (who knows, although sometimes an abbreviation for week) are also becoming very well used. “Sup” (short for “what’s up”) and “yo” are basic greetings, as it “hig” (how’s it going?).
Another modern part of your texting vocabulary which is especially important on twitter is the concept of hash tagging, which is when you put a pound sign (#) in front of a word, or group of words. It allows other people who are not already following you on Twitter to see what you have to say on a particular topic.
Texting Vocabulary – Conclusion
So that’s a good introduction to the vocabulary of the texting world. Now get out there on Twitter or your cell phone and try it out.