By Jeff Bowman
Every once in a while something comes along that changes the way we do things, view things or think about things. New words are added to our vocabulary displacing older ones that were hip just scant years prior. My Grandsire used to speak of my risibility and jocularity and might refer to the cost of a soda as 2 bits. Today the 10,000 words or so in my regular vocabulary might be as foreign to him as the words used above are to you.
We can thank or blame technology for the changes we see today. I used to marvel as a kid how my father could communicate with other people in other countries simply by tapping a code into a large radio set, and deciphering the code that came back to him. No words!
It really is no different for me today, as I marvel how my kids tap messages into a cell phone to communicate with their friends. I seemed to have gotten lost somewhere in the middle of Ham radio, CBs and Text messaging. I couldn’t read Morse code, I didn’t have a CB to 10-4 good buddies, and I have trouble understanding what is written in text today. I had to ask a young person on Facebook why they commented “Little Old Lady” on a story (blog) I had written. To my shame and embarrassment, they replied that isn’t what “LOL” means today. It was the today part that got me. I’m stuck in a GCG, generation communication gap it would appear.
Never to be seen as an old fart again, I have done some homework on the internet. I found a dictionary of text and chat abbreviations. Now I will be able to understand the non-verbal messages of today. I can communicate over my phone without speaking, which seems rather counterproductive to me, but it is the accepted method today. I won’t be “that guy” anymore. I cn cr8 msgs to MOOS & MOSS that r shrt & 2 the pt. No1 will evr LTAO on my acct again. Now my BF’s will have NP when I type ttyl.
Oh how far we have come from hieroglyphics on walls of caves to … wait a minute…!
Bramptonetc
jeffpad
Stephen Rhodes