My son isn’t speaking to me anymore. Instead he texts, tweets and updates his Facebook profile. From what I can infer, he’s doing fine.
I have trouble understanding his messages because I’m not fluent in “text”. Unlike him, I’m not a native speaker. He makes fun of my text messages and says that I’m old-fashioned and anybody hip to the real lingo can tell I’m not a cool cat. (Whenever I talk like that he just rolls his eyes.)
If I send him a perfectly reasonable message like, “I’m guessing you’re out of groceries and need to do your laundry. Do you plan to come home this weekend? Love, Dad” He answers with some cryptic note like “AFAIK”. When I seek clarification with, “I’m sorry. I didn’t quite get that,” he responds with a testy, “AS FAR AS I KNOW.” If I ask him why he didn’t just say that in the first place he texts back, “Don’t make me waste letters.”
Text-speech is a linguistic system based entirely on torturing the English language. Familiar words and phrases are compressed like a spider under a bowling ball until all of the eloquence is squashed out of them. “In real life” becomes “IRL”; “Laughing out loud” becomes “LOL”; “University of California at Los Angeles” becomes “UCLA”; and “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” becomes “FTW”.
Like an English-speaking tourist stranded in Estonia, I’ve had to learn text-speech by immersion. It’s a necessary skill because my son prefers texting to talking the way fish prefer the ocean to mountaintops.
One morning I woke to find a message from him on my cell phone. It read, “Car borked. Called 3A.” It took me two minutes to decode this into, “My car has broken down. I have called AAA for assistance.” As I started to respond, I looked at the time stamp and realized he’d sent the message at nine-thirty the night before; it had been waiting on my phone for eight-and-a-half hours. Had AAA arrived? Where was the car? What was wrong with it? Most importantly, given that he had to be actually holding his phone to send the message, why didn’t he just call me?
Employing a technology familiar to my generation I dialed his number and waited for him to answer. I was greeted with a sleepy, “What?”
“Are you okay?” I asked, fighting the urge to turn into unreasonable Dad.
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Where’s the car?”
“I dropped it at the tire shop and got a ride home with the tow-truck guy.”
“Why didn’t you call me when it happened?”
“’Cause everything was fine.”
“Then why did you text me?”
“I thought you’d want to know what I was doing.”
Like most of his generation, my son is firmly convinced that everyone is deeply interested in the details of his life. That’s why you’ll find them all on Twitter.
If you haven’t heard of Twitter it’s a sign that you have successfully avoided exposure to the mass media for the past several months and should be congratulated. For the benefit of those of you in that category — all one of you — let me explain Twitter. (The rest of you just stand by for a minute and I’ll get on with the essay shortly.)
Twitter is a free service which allows users to post messages of 140 characters or less. These messages answer the question, “What are you doing?” and are called “tweets”. Once posted, they appear on the screens of other Twitter users who are called “Followers”. Being on Twitter is sort of like standing in a room full of people who are shouting out random bits of trivia. Occasionally, a miracle occurs and an actual conversation breaks out. After a minute or two, people go back to the random shouting. It’s bite-sized interaction for a culture possessing the attention span of an chihuahua on an espresso IV. And, to be honest, I can’t get enough of it.
I’m desperate to know what the other people in my network are doing right now. For example, if you look on my Twitter stream you’ll see that Nomad451 just tweeted, “Listening to The Basically Podcast Show with Lenny Treetop.” Reading this makes me feel that Nomad451 is a real person, not just a name on a screen. If I follow enough of his postings, I start to feel like I actually know him. And, in a way, I do…the same creepy, slightly disturbing way that a stalker “knows” a celebrity.
The really cool thing about Twitter is that there are millions of users. By tracking what people are tweeting about, you have an instant gauge of the public mood on any number of important topics like politics and world events and what Ashton Kutcher is doing right now. With the proper stimulus, the Twitter mob can become a force for good as they spread the word on some vitally important current event. Unfortunately, since the percentage of geeks is unusually high among Twitter users they are as likely to be frantic about the length of the ads during the newest episode of Lost as they are about the world financial meltdown.
That’s not to say that Twitter is completely worthless. It’s being used in all sorts of creative ways. In March of 2008 somebody named Garazi proposed to somebody named Stefsull via Twitter.
Really.
I hope they stuck to the traditional ceremony and didn’t conduct the wedding via Twitter. To fit the 140 character limit, the traditional vow would have to be rendered down to something like, “I @Garazi take you @Stefsull to be my wife for better/worse richer/poorer sicker/weller 2 have & 2 hold til death or Fail Whale do us part” At least, in a Twitter-centric world, the Best Man’s toast would be mercifully short.
6 Comments
05/02/2009 at 18:32
Kevin,
I sometimes have this issue with any one of my four kids. Your essay was very educational. However, you could have gone on for another 3 days writing about emoticons or “smileys”. My son typed an e-mail to me which included the following emoticon: >.<
I had to use Google to found out he was implying frustration.
I’m a pretty hip Daddy-o but I had to spend some time in cool school to dig his gig.
If that last phrase didn;t make both our sons eyes roll, nothing will.
Shane
http://bdgjm.blogspot.com
05/04/2009 at 02:17
You know, Shane, I’m beginning to think that children are God’s way of telling me that I’m getting old.
05/04/2009 at 12:53
I think children are God’s way of telling us we should have been nicer to our parents. My mother was a frequent recipient of sarcastic Southern humor and practical jokes. She was, if nothing else, a good sport. All I can do these days is try to be a good sport.
05/06/2009 at 02:42
Thanks for the kind comment on BDGJM. It means a lot coming from you.
05/21/2009 at 02:03
I hate it too when I receive text messages in short form. No, I dun geddit wen u do dat. Y? Not everyone knows what you mean, and it only takes a few seconds more to type it out in full. In fact, most phones have a word predictor feature that offers some possible words from the first few characters that you type. Even abbreviation is a short word with word predictor. And if you keep your message short, which is the point of text messaging, you won’t run out of characters.
And in case you’re wondering, I’m 19 years old. I’ve owned a mobile phone since I was 17 and I’ve never used text-speech. Nor in email, either.
05/21/2009 at 04:01
Thanks, Summer…for the encouraging comment and for holding the line on the proper use of English.