Supercalifragalistic-txt-pialidocious

[j4]

"It was so nerve wracking. My hands started to shake. I couldn't get my apostrophe"

[thanks to brrm for the link]

I used to have a phone which didn't have a semicolon. When complaining about this to other people I found that they were generally more sympathetic if I told them I needed it for winking emoticons; actually, though, I just like semicolons. I once got 3 house-points for "good punctuation", and I think that was mostly because of the semicolons. It's all gone to pot now, though. I blame kitteh, though the rot probably started setting in when ox.test represented the cutting edge of timewasting technology. Might it be coffee time now, please?

Comments

[redbird]

I don't see why some people say they can't type "I love you" or "I'll be there at 2" as full sentences; I can, and they keep telling me that us old folks don't pick things up as fast as the young.

Like you, I like semicolons.

Have some tea.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Ta for the tea. :)

I do use some abbreviations, sometimes, but most of the time the difference between the 10 seconds it takes me to type a phrase in full and the 5 seconds it takes to type it in txtspk form just isn't actually that important to me. I suppose if the text you were sending was "HELP am bng et by lion" it might be important to save those couple of seconds, but what if the person you were texting didn't understand and had to text back to say "WTF r u talkin bout?" -- what then? I mean, by then you'd have been well and truly eaten. At least, that's how I look at it. A semicolon in time saves death-by-lion, I always say.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

I suppose txt abbreviations are just keystroke macros that aren't automagically expanded. Pity.

[sparrowsion]

I spend so long organising my thoughts into words, that the amount of time saved by using txtspk forms, particularly taking into account the fact that my phone has a 39-key pseudo-QWERTY keyboard, is a negligable fraction. The value of using abbreviations is getting things down to 160 characters.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I find the miniQWERTYs on Treos harder than thumb-press texting!

I love the challenge of getting things down to 160 characters without resorting to strange abbreviations. Sometimes I spend 10 minutes rewriting the damn thing to get it written elegantly within the limit. Fortunately I have not yet been eaten by a lion as a result (see above, or possibly below).

Thinking about it, the abbreviations I do occasionally use tend to be netnewsy acronyms, which is really just old-person's txtspk. 8-)

[j4.livejournal.com]

Above. Definitely above. Why don't I have proper threading in my brain?

[lnr]

I tend to think of threading as trn-like tree diagrams, which would lead to "see left".

I abbreviate in text messages mostly by using terser sentences and leaving out words rather than shortening them - though usenet acronyms are a bit hard-wired into my speech patterns. And I punctuate them the same way I do other communications: which is to say not very accurately.