The new English

Every once in a while, when I'm perusing (not persuing) my friends on Facebook, I'll come across a post where someone uses Internet shorthand to articulate their message.

I'm not sure "articulate" is actually the correct word here. The message can be filled with acronyms all over the place, which requires something like a code-breaking machine to translate. UKWIM?

I think this particular type of shorthand came about with the advent of Twitter, because apparently, you can use only so many characters in a Twitter post. I don't Twitter. I don't Tweet. IDK, it just seems like a CWOT to me, if not a GWOT.

The King's English (or maybe it's the Queen's English, since she's been on the throne for about 70 years now) has always been good enough for me. I like words. I like to play with them, to fool around with their meaning, to make them rhyme, to make them paint a picture if I can. Too many acronyms slow me down and distract me from comprehending the actual message. It requires a multitasking ability that I guess I don't have. I'm sooo OOT.

Some shorthand I just don't get. Why is K the Internet substitute for OK? Are we really saving bandwidth with this? Saving time? I'm O_O.

Then there are acronyms with letters and numbers in them, similar to a license plate. Like "P3r5On", which means "person." It actually looks like the word "person", it has the same number of characters as "person", why can't we just use "person"? It actually seems more difficult to type out the shorthand version. DOH.

All of this kind of makes me wonder how Shakespeare, the master wordsmith, would shake out in today's world: 2B or not 2B, that is the ?

Hmmm. Maybe not. Quill pens don't travel through time very well.

BTW, do these acronyms take some of the venom and vitriol out of swearing? Can I tell somebody to GTH and it simply makes them LOL 4COL? J/W.

Well, G2G. CUL while I CUWTA.

Ha.