Of Acronyms & Abbreviations

Its high time I admit my ignorance of most of the short forms doing rounds over internet and mobiles. I can claim to know that i.e is for id est, e.g is for exempli gratia, but only a few days back, I came to know what brb and ttyl stands for and I still not know what does zoth,zomg and few others stand for!!so here’s a recollection of some of the incidents that I had to face, in my effort to decipher these short forms!
Case 1: it was about 2 years back . I , along with 2 other school friends were chatting in the yahoo messenger conference. One of them cracked a joke. I being a rookie in the chat world then, only managed to put up a grin smiley. The other one wrote ‘lol’. “Whats that?”, I wandered. Neways , ignoring the trifle 3 lettered word, I continued chatting. Then the friend again cracked a joke. The other one wrote “lolzzz”, then she again wrote “lolzzzzie”. I began to wander what has happened to her, is she not getting that those were jokes? Or her keyboard or mouse is not working properly?it was only after few days that when I met her and dared to ask her what that lol business was all about, that she took out a piece of paper and explained to me as if she was solving an infinite series—
“listen , lol stands for laugh out loud….ok? and loz is the plural form…ok? See..
lol(1)…lol(2)…lol(3)…lol(4)………………lol(n)==lolz….ok? and lol(n+1)=lozz and so on….ok?
I nodded my head.
Case2: I had changed the profile photo of my orkut profile that day .
A friend of mine scrapped me” nice dp!”
I did n’t get it.
After a few days, another friend scrapped me,” awesome pp”.
“whats that ?”.
that very day, somebody scrapped me and said, “ hey liked your op very much, mind being friends?”
generally, never do I entertain those ‘lets-be-friends -kind -of -messages’ ,but that day, I was so very irritated by continuous bombarding by short forms, that I immediately scrapped him back and said,
“ya, I will be your friend, first tell me what op, pp and dp mean?”.
I did n’t have the slightest inclination to know what the person thought about this , but all I knew was, that I must solve this short form puzzle right then.
“Op stands for orkut picture, dp stands for display photo, and pp stands for profile photo”.
“thank you , and bye”, I said.
Case 3: once when I logged in to orkut, one of my friends scrapped me “sup?”.
I searched the nearest and farthest corners of my mind, but nowhere could I find a word ‘sup’. Since I was not replying(rather was not able to reply),the chap on the other side again scrapped me with the dreadful word in it! After 10 minutes, a scrap came,” are you not online? Neways , I am leaving, see you later”. I heaved a sigh of relief!
Some days later. Orkut login, same friend, same scrap ! “sup?” ohh god, save me!
10 minutes passed. Again same scrap . “sup?”. My ignorance of the word ,was taking its toll. I scrapped him back,”what is sup?”.
“ohh you were stumbling at this word?, it stands for whats up?”, pat came the reply.
“I see”.

Can any law of contraction justify the un necessary tamperings of life as lyfe, time as tyme, my as mah,cool as kewl?
Many think, the words look cute .
I had an equally tough time to get that 10Q stands for thank you and 10x is for thanks !
i mean, thanks and thank you are sensitive forms of courtesy and its kind of insult when you stick to such shortened forms of the words, at least over the internet where your words limits are aplenty, unlike sms.

the aim of language is to communicate.there are many ways to save time, but definitely language is not among them. And using these sms lingo, the task of comprehension does not always become easier, mostly it’s the other way round.
In a word where vowels are removed and the remnants are only 3 from the original 6 lettered word,the brain always has to do some extra work,to figure out what it means, by looking at the words suroounding it, which also may be similarly ambiguous .

Neways,chatting and sms ing being informal places, we can a bit of excuse those who wish to let their hair down.