I am being very uncool at the moment but there is a whole new language circulating and half the time I really struggle to understand it. I am getting better. I now know what IDK means when I get texts from my granddaughter or OMY from my kids. Some of the new language leaves me a bit nonplussed, however. I recently sent an email only to get a reply from the person’s colleague as follows – he is OOO.
OOO what? I thought. Silly me – he was out of office.
I guess it makes sense that we should have abbreviations like this with the widespread use of texting. By the way I hate texting on my phone – I just haven’t got the knack of the two thumb speed typing that some people have. Maybe its because I have been touch typing for so long now. I actually get put off when I look at the keyboard.
So did this abbreviated speak come about because people are lazy? Apparently not. When twitter first started you could only use 140 characters for a tweet so abbreviations were here to stay.
They can be quite sneaky too – apparently teens started using some abbreviations as code – e.g. PAW – parents are watching. PITR – parent in the room. Quite alarming actually.
I thought some of these might come in handy – maybe I will start throwing a few into my regular emails and see if people know what I am talking about –
IFYP – I feel your pain.
ADIH – another day in hell
OMDB – over my dead body
The best I came across was – AYMM – are you my mother?
Well I guess it is a good thing to start cutting down on verbiage. Having worked for lawyers for many years I was used to sentences than ran on for half a page properly punctuated. That’s not to mention the paragraphs ….
Paragraph 1 had a sub paragraph (a) which had a sub- paragraph (i) so when you had to refer to a previous paragraph you were looking at 2(b)(iv) …. LOL even my auto correct didn’t like that.
So
IDK
IDC
Quite useful actually.
