As I arrived at work this morning I found the topic of today's workshop to be "Text Messaging". Dreading the answer, I asked myself if it could really be the case that I am to be teaching the language bastardisation that SMS English is. It was "yes", naturally.
When it comes to this linguistic abomination, I'm a dinosaur. I write my text messages in complete and correctly punctuated sentences. I find it off-putting to read messages with 4, U, C and whatever else lazy people write. Nor do I understand the abbreviations. I have to Google most of them. It's only a few weeks ago that I found out what "lol" means. Twice I have asked my brother "what do you mean, brb?", only to get annoyed that he has left the chat without telling me.
However, as I am now to be teaching this, I decided to dive into the world of one-letter words and searched out a list of those commonly used. I have to admit that some are rather clever. I am also amused at the originality of rude comments. The list is, in fact, so full of rudeness that I felt compelled to check with my manager that it wasn't too much even for one of my classes (I never shy away from teaching "conversational" English ). He was kind enough to point out that I might want to remove the ones that I don't want to have to explain in class. Hence btycl (booty call) quickly disappeared!
2 comments:
Did you happen to come across my entire dictionary of one-letter words? (Because sometimes even minimalists need a thousand definitions for 24 letters.)
http://www.OneLetterWords.com
No, I didn't but I've checked it out now. Great for reference, but babe...why are you Harry Potter?
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