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LOL as Telegraph grapples with text-speak

December 11, 2008

It’s official: text-speak is now part of everyday English.

As lexicographer Jonathon Green, editor of the recently published Chambers Slang Dictionary, tells today’s Telegraph: “What we’re seeing is the influence of technology coupled with current events and, inevitably of the young, who in many cases drive language. It’s focused on this world of mobile phones – these abbreviations are perfectly suited to those little screens.”

Anyone with teenage children will confirm the extent to which this is true. One of Blade’s offspring recently completed an English essay whose many profound insights into Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven were somewhat uneasy on the eye thanks to the repeated use of “u” instead of “you”. Better yet, thought Blade, would have been the impersonal pronoun – but is this simply a stylistic preference, akin to preferring “you” to “u”?

Language in all its Protean glory has recently been explored in The English Project’s excellent Kitchen Table Lingo, a book which sought to capture the overlooked words we bandy about in our homes or offices, terms such as “mallishag” (used by some inhabitants of the Isle of Wight to describe small insects), “griffley” (a dog with a grumpy face) and “Snotfair”,  a contraction of “it’s not fair” which is used by academics to describe a meeting with a student who is unhappy with his or her grade.

Blade suspects that the mutations of English identified in Kitchen Table Lingo are viewed rather more sympathetically than those derived from technology in the Chambers Slang Dictionary. Perhaps this is an age thing, or maybe it’s because so many of the new slang terms contain numbers, anathema to the philologist. For example, to call someone a 404 might seem recondite but it hails from the world of IT, its root being the “404 error” message displayed on an otherwise blank page when an internet browser cannot find a website (thus to be a 404 is to be an idiot). Likewise, to be “35″ is not necessarily to describe one’s age but one’s finances, thanks to the Code 35 message an Oyster card user receives when their card is out of cash (”I’m a bit 35″ is therefore an admission of fiscal embarrassment, for Londoners if no one else).

Where is it all going? Will we one day delight not in exquisite prose but a strange blend of acronym, slang and numerics, all predicated on how quickly and easily they can be typed into a mobile phone?

Perhaps, but by way of proving just how perilous venturing into this world is, it appears that the Telegraph believe that “LOL” stands for “lots of love”. To which, M8, u mite not b ROTFL but u can LOL.

For more on LOL, click here and here.