Thanks for the pic, Freefoto.com! Free = cool.I know this is potentially the World's Most Boring Topic and you may hear a faint 'neigh! neigh!' as I flog this almost dead horse, but text speak really shits me.
Not so much for the purity of the language thang but because it takes me too bloody long to read it.
My marker of an unsuccessful text communication is when I have to lean over to the person sitting next to me on the train and say "I'm so awfully sorry to bother you, but I've just received this very silly message from a very lovely but silly friend and I can't understand a bleedin' word of it. Would you be ever so kind as to tell me what 'ttyl' means?"
Usually said neighbour and the chappy sitting behind us are stumped too. The kid across the aisle suggests 'time to yell loudly' and I throw in 'ten tonne yellow legs' but that doesn't seem to make much sense at all. Half an hour (and several new friends) later we're still no closer to knowing what the heck darn it all means.
So a new study has shown it takes almost a trillion years to read a message in text-speak out loud while it takes only 14 seconds to read a message in 'conventional English'. Frankly I'd rather be creating a new universe or counting blades of grass etc in that trillion years than getting to the nutty core of 'ttyl'.
On the plus side, taking half an hour to read a text may lead to delightful flights of fancy: as Words, Wine, Coffee, Art suggested a few posts ago, 'lol' could easily be 'little old lady'. Throw in a haunted castle, accountant and a set of coloured pencils and we've got a Great Australian Novel. Noice.
