When you text, do you usually use abbreviations or acronyms?

@Torsten Dettlaff / Pexels

Texting culture has been evolving so much and there’s just so much to learn. I get confused all the time when people text with acronyms and abbreviations. Even though they are made up of common words that should be easily to understand, I still find it quite tough to grasp. I personally usually stick with typing the whole word out just because I feel like that is my style and I like it that way. It is rare that you will see me texting friends with lol, brb, ttyl or rofl.

There was a time where I had to be mindful of choosing my words for texting and that was when I had a very cheap phone plan that charged 15 cents for every text I sent. Does this ring a bell to you? That was quite a while back, but I can still remember that phase where I just had to shorten my messages so that it wouldn’t exceed the character count and charge me for a second text message.

When I’m texting and messaging with my friends, they like to use a lot of abbreviations and acronyms. I learn from them so that I can stay with the trend, but I don’t usually type it myself in my messages. Instead, I like to use a lot of emojis to represent my feelings and it adds more humour in my message. If someone types LOL (laugh out loud), I might reply with the laughing emoji with tears. When the situation is awkward or disappointing, some people might type SMH (shaking my head) and I might use the facepalm emoji.

@cottonbro studio / Pexels

There are so many ways to express different things with texting culture, you just need to get creative with it and make sure the person you talk to understands what you meant by it. It occurred to me a few weeks ago, when I was using the grinning face with the sweat drop, I ran into a little awkward problem. My friend from Mainland China, asked me why I used that emoji so often and what I thought this meant. She didn’t understand the context behind me using it, because she views it to have a totally different meaning. According to her, this emoji has become a negative expression of taunt, mock or satire and when used in a conversation it is somewhat disrespectful. I argued that I didn’t know about that and I thought that this emoji meant to be relieved or to express a little awkwardness in nervous situations.

I noticed that in Chinese texting culture, the younger generation uses a lot of abbreviations too and most of them are English letters. However, they actually represent the first letter of each Chinese character which corresponds to their pinyin. Something similar to ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing) would be XSWL (pinyin: xiào sǐ wǒ le), which means laughing myself to death.

Check out this hilarious video on Gen Z texting culture: