[OceanTragic]

Originally Posted by mridula

Mach I found it , it was on the BBC, as I said. Enjoy

mridula, ur so book, rotflmao.

My last comment for this thread is that if you can only type textese then STFU and FOAD

MODS: sorry, couldn't resist, but this will be the last time, I promis. Hopefully you won't ban me instantly as I didn't really swear, it was text speak and that ain't allowed, so surely it can't count?

[Dilliwala]

Originally Posted by mridula

That's becos it starts predicting the possibilities with the first letter on the concerned key, then the 2nd, then the 3rd, etc.
This happened to me just today - try typing c-o-v-e-r, one by one. You get "an", "ant", "ante", before it miraculously springs to "cover".

[kidsan]

even my username is textspeak (it's what mobile phones make of my real name 'kieran')...do i need to change that now?

[Dilliwala]

What does the text say when you try to type "kidsan"?

[kidsan]

Originally Posted by Dilliwala

What does the text say when you try to type "kidsan"?

er...kidsan or sometimes kidsam

[Nick-H]

Of course, I can't find the link again to quote, but www.somethingawful.com, hardly a forum of old foggies, put it something like, "try not to sound like a 12-year old!"

If I do find the paragraph again...

[artisticanurag]

Im sorry guys, but i would like to say only some of us are so very used this text talk technique that it happens without our own consciousness. Trust me i have tried my best since a while to control this but sooner than later one or two words just pop out of no where. If some younger people do commit this mistakes im sure they can be rectified and talked to with ease. Like a new member from states today did the same thing.

im sorry for the text speech but i have explained with honesty and i speak for a lot of young guns here.

[holikarang]

I don't think I'm old and I know text speech, but I've always found it annoying (even when I was 20)... why do you think it is only something related to age? It just does not make communication easy...

[Nick-H]

I don't think it is age related any longer. My wife uses it freely when sending text messages to younger friends and family; her son's inlaws, who are older than us, also use it freely --- all in the SMS context, of course.

The difference between them and me is that I do not have offspring who are now in their early twenties, so I did not pick it up. Still... the age range of my friends and acquaintances is still very very wide, as I was playing music with very young people for the last few years back in London.

People have told me that they hate e-mail: I reply that I love e-mail, partly because I think that it has resurrected the art of letter writing. There is no reason that technology should make things worse.

What sometimes surprises me is that we are not out of step with the rest of the world. Somethingawful might well be too young an environment for me! I drop by because I like some of their front-page humour, and their weekly photoshop displays --- but they deprecate the lingo. So do team-BHP, where I do spend some of my internet time. We are not alone!

[Aishah]

And this old fogie has to add she loves email too - in fact communication with friends is much better these days than the old-fashioned letter system which takes so long to arrive to remote places.
However, whilst SMS is fine for sending via telephones where it takes ages to tap out your message via that tiny keyboard, it's not fine here - I struggle to understand some of the abbreviations, and as has been frequently pointed out, so do many of our members from around the world.
I'm at an advantage because years and years ago I learned touch-typing, so to type a word in full is effortless for me. I can understand if your typing skills on a computer keyboard are limited to one finger from each hand, then full spelling might slow you down a bit, but I still think worth the effort for this Forum. I'm inclined to agree with former posters here who think SMS makes one look like a young, immature person on a first impression - it's heartening to discover when an SMS user starts posting in full English they certainly are quite different to the first impressions they created about themselves!

[puchoo]

Its got nothing to do with age but making a conscious effort to not use it. We all use it while possibly posting on other sites and while sending sms's but how many time would one use it in official correspondence , documentation etc.....we wont...simply because its not done and will not be appreciated... if you can control it there , there is no reason to not control it here.

[artisticanurag]

Guys, Guys - all i was trying to do was apologize and say that its not so much intentional, i hope you guys have already noticed me avoiding it.

Yes i think it has got to do with age, people who haven't ever written normal letters via mail are more vulnerable to text language habit. There are few surveys on this, i guess one from bbc too or cnn i don't remember.

[holikarang]

Originally Posted by artisticanurag

Yes i think it has got to do with age, people who haven't ever written normal letters via mail are more vulnerable to text language habit. There are few surveys on this, i guess one from bbc too or cnn i don't remember.

well, I agree on this, what I meant is, I could use that language too and actually find it fun sometimes, but I simply don't like it everywhere, this does not mean I'm old. I understand one has to make some space economy with sms, but there is no need to do the same everywhere, as it gives me the impression of killing a language and making communication harder.

In Italian kids use the letter 'k' in texts, but it does not exist in Italian, I also use it in a couple of words in texts but would never use it anywhere else. I think it's a matter of context also...I'm afraid that this will change the way we write a language with time...