Lettering

First there was letter writing, and then there was email, so instead of spending all that money on stationery and stamps, you could just hit send.

Email looked pretty much like its predecessor, beginning with “Dear” and ending with something formal (“Sincerely”), or casual (“Love”).

Then came texting, the Wild West of written communication, where rules could be broken and grammar could be ignored. It was an alphabetic dream/nightmare.

Sometimes letters took the place of words: R U OK? And C U SOON. Simple stuff

But sometimes entire words were replaced by their initial letters. This made typing texts a lot easier, but made reading them a lot harder.

LOL was a big surprise to those who thought it meant “lots of love,” when it actually meant “laugh out loud.” In an effort to decode text abbreviations, people began googling everything from IMHO (“in my humble opinion”) to TBH (“to be honest” — As opposed to…?)

Here are some text abbreviations that I, personally, would like to see adopted:

WDTEM - what does that even mean?
WAYTA - what are you talking about?
TII - this is insane
CYJSIO - can you just spell it out?
WWWW - what's wrong with words?
EOTIWCY - enough of this – I will call you

So it turns out people are still writing letters. It's just that they’re not writing words.

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Funny story: While I was working on this, I took a break to do a crossword puzzle. One of the clues was "The ‘L’ of TTYL.” It means “talk to you later.” I had to look it up.

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