According to a story on the BBC website, Don’t be 404, know the tech slang, new words and expressions are entering the language, driven by modern technology such as Oyster cards, the internet, mobile phones and “textese”.
This probably won’t come as much of a surprise to many of us already happy to include abbreviations like b4, u, @ and wld in our msgs in an attempt to keep the costs down, even if we baulk at l8r and draw the line at ur, wat or y?.
It’s not as if the concept of using abbreviations was new; I’ve always thought of txtspeke as little more than a modern version of the old Speedwriting system advertised widely on the London Underground in the 80s with a slogan along the lines of “f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb”.
Still, the article in question refers to a Post Office report (downloadable here) which isn’t so much talking about TLAs and abbreviations, as other slang words and expresions which derive less predictably. Tech slang like the 404 of the headline which basically means clueless, from the “404 not found” page we have all come across on occasions on the web.
As for mobile phones, it seems that “the very act of text messaging can throw up new terms.”
For example, the predictive text tools tend to produce book when users type the letters for cool (and we should probably not wonder that cool is a word many txtrs want to use).
This has been taken to its logical conclusion and book now means cool in txtese.
As a brief corollary to this story, I’d like to mention another BBC story: Many lie over books ‘to impress’.
Does this mean young people want to look bookish in order to look book?
don't confuse the narrator 