Net Lingo!

When we were in school and college, and I’m talking of nearly 30 years ago, we had just  about one informal acronym in use- LOL, which we used to scribble at the bottom of greeting cards, and which meant, quite simply, ‘lots of love’. Quite recently I came to know that now-a-days the acronym is more often used for ‘laugh out loud’, in internet parlance. Internet has been around for a few years now, and I always considered myself an ‘updated bloke’ on technology, very proud of the fact that I was aware of newer terms in the internet lingo viz BTW (By the way) and CU (see you). My pride took a serous dent the other day when I sent across a humorous text to my daughter. She immediately replied with ‘ROTFLOL’. Assuming that she made some mistake punching in the keys on her keypad, I called her up to inform her of the oversight. Sounding seriously disappointed with me, she told me that she was too deft with the keypad to make silly mistakes and that I should look up the meaning of ROTFLOL. After spending just a few minutes on Google, not only did I realize that ROTFLOL meant ‘roll out on the floor laughing out loud’, it dawned upon me that she had actually been considerate to her poor dad by not replying with ‘ROTFLMFAO’, an acronym that I cannot possibly expand here for decency’s sake. Google offered links to sites fully dedicated to internet and even Facebook lingo. There was even one paid site- $1.95 for 50 acronyms! God!

Upon returning from a recent vacation, I updated my status with proper and perfect English words, trying to sound as poetic as possible about our trip. However, I was quite flabbergasted by my daughter’s status who had this to write on her wall: ‘Had ma gr8test vacs eva with ma fmly n frnds…srsly njyd ma best!! :) :D’ ‘Now what sort of English is that?!’ I asked my daughter. She smirked, ‘who wants to read boring perfect language on the net, dad? Look at the number of ‘likes’ and comments I get for my statuses and look at what happens to yours…’ she almost said tch, tch. Indeed, she had comments pouring in from her friends in much the same language she used…And my status was responded to by a    ‘few old men and women’- as she put it!

Is it now da time to frgt the good ol’ English and swich ova to the nu nd fab net lingo? Tell me, k? CU..!!