SMH over texting
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One of the snarkiest things you can do when texting is to respond with a single “K.” This I learned from my college-student daughter, who reacted badly when I answered a texted question with “K.” I meant it as “OK” but that apparently was not how she took it.
“Why are you mad?” she texted.
“What makes you think I’m mad,” I texted back. “I said it’s OK.”
“No, you said K,” she reminded me.
In the increasingly tricky world of communication by text, “OK” is OK but “K” is not OK, unless you are ticked off, in which case “K” is the shorthand for “whatever,” delivered with an eye roll.
Digital communication has become an alphabet jumble. The abbreviations took hold with the advent of texting, when typing with two thumbs was clunky and we found it more expeditious to shorten things. By now everyone knows that LOL means “laughing out loud” and TTYL means “talk to you later.”
But what about the rest of them? The letter parade has marched off the smartphone screen and onto our laptops, where emails and social media posts are so rife with shorthands I often have to stop and look up what they mean. (If there’s not an app that will read and translate the abbreviations in real time, someone should create one.)
Reading a work email, I happened upon IIRC. Even in context the meaning wasn’t obvious. What does it mean? I indicate real concern? If I really count? Is the inevitable really coming?
It means, If I read correctly. Am I the only one who didn’t know that?
How ironic that the shorthand meant to speed things up for the writer ends up slowing things down for the reader. I should print out a list of abbreviations and glue it to my phone, then I wouldn’t have to stop work to translate the following: OTOH is on the other hand. FTFY is fix that for you . HTH is hope this helps.
Now, I’m a speedy typist – so fast that it takes less time for me to type out a whole phrase than to find the caps lock key, type the right abbreviation, and then turn off the caps lock. I’d be happy to ditch the shorthand and go back to the old way.
Perhaps the most ubiquitous shorthand is ROTFL. When something on social media is even mildly humorous, you’ll see that one. I am quick to laugh, but I can count on a couple of fingers the number of times I have ever rolled on the floor laughing. Does anyone ever?
Funny, though, to find out I’ve been wrong about some of the most common shorthands. I always knew that BF means boyfriend, and I thought BFF meant best female friend. Now I know it’s best friend forever.
As I look back over this column, I don’t like how cluttered it looks with all the alphabets. This must be what it’s like to read a computer coding textbook. Or to carry on a long texting conversation with a teenager.
Most of us know that SMH means shaking my head, but since this is my column, I’m going to take the liberty of changing the meaning to so much hooey. That’s how I feel about all this shorthand. I could have used a stronger word than hooey, of course, but then that would be NSFW.
Look it up.