20110416

lshccomnaiweda... What?


"OMG! LOL's in the OED. LMAO!"

I have no idea whether the expression above shows how the English language is going to be like in the (not-so-distant) future, but there are signs that such "Net Speak", has not only infiltrated into daily usage but also been inducted into the canon of the English language. Increasingly, in the work emails (not so many years ago, my supervisor at work maintained that one should say "email messages" rather than "emails" as "email" should not be taken as a countable noun) written by my colleagues, I see more and more occurrences of BTW, Thx, etc. I haven't seen any LOL (meaning "laugh out loud") yet, but the fact that the Internet slang term is, as the opening sentence says, in the Oxford English Dictionary, means that linguists have acknowledged its place in the language. As Graeme Diamond, the OED's principal editor for new words says, love it or loathe it, it is now a legitimate word in our lexicon.

While such initialism has become the trend, some slang abbreviations may have gone a bit too far, such as "lshccomnaiweda", which means "laughing so hard coke came out my nose and i wasn't even drinking any". Language purists understandably regard the situation as a literacy crisis, while the liberals see it as enriching the language and such "code switching" by children as beneficial. Like it or not, as Diamond says, "language is a vibrant, evolving animal". It is bound to change according to popular usage.

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