Wots dat u say?

The other day I was having a conversation with one of my younger cousins on facebook chat and it made me realize just how many abbreviations and slang words are used now when conversing over the internet or txt. She had a slang word for nearly every word in our conversation. It actually made me feel really old and out of loop.

The abundance of internet slang is a prime example of the effect the internet has on our culture, to even go as far as to change the way we speak. Take the word email for example which use to be considered an abbreviation for electronic mail but has now become a proper word. There are numerous words, once considered internet slang which are now used in every day vocabulary. This shorthand style of writing, originally to save time so as to fit on small screens such as mobile phones, personal organizers and to send text messages has now become part of modern society.

For those of you familiar with George Orwell’s book 1984, you may be able to find similarities between the internet slang used today and newspeak. For those of you who have not read the book, newspeak was a Government party encouraged and developed style of speaking where words were shortened, compacted and brought together so as to limit the possibility of new, free thoughts. Now I’m not saying that words such as lol, brb, g2g and lmao and acronyms which have been thought up by the government to limit our thinking. Rather, I am pointing out the prevalence of internet jargon in our everyday vocabulary, especially in younger generations and how such words have slowly changed the way we converse.