With the expansion of technological development in communication, sentences and words in communication are shrinking to weird abbreviations and short forms. When you look at your kids’ chat dialog box, you may find your kids are typing in completely foreign language. You do not understand this ‘IM Language’ they communicate or the ‘chat slang’ they are most frequent to type. You must be worried that your kids are ruining their language skills and do not follow rules of sentence construction or grammar. And also you could be skeptical whether they interact or meet as you cannot figure out what they are talking. How many times have you seen typing them a message like “Im 47/m/ny, LMIRL 121”? (Yes, you should.)
This abbreviated form of conversation is to be translated as “I’m a 47 years old male who lives in New York, let’s meet in real life one to one.”
We all use abbreviations in our conversation, both written and verbal. But, the text messages on mobile phones and chat programs have taken it to a new level and abbreviated a complete sentence. Hence, to understand what languages your kids speak and what they are typing, whom they are talking to – you need to delve into the world of chat acronyms and start becoming familiar.
Here is one tip: your kids mostly remove vowels from the words to fit their entire text message in the stipulated word size of words. For this, “Thanks For The Memories” goes short like “Thnks fr th Mmrs”. You must be familiar to commonly used acronyms such as lol (laugh out loud), brb (be right back), btw (by the way) etc. So, here are some more unfathomable chat acronyms that were alien to you.
121: one to one
ADN: any day now
AFK: away from keyboard
AFAIK: as far as I know
B4N: bye for now
BBFD: big bad forum discussion
BB: best boy
BFF: best friends forever and BFFL: Best Friends For Life and BFFN: Best Friends for now
BMA: best mate always
BG: big grin or best girl
BRT: be right there
BNR: but not really
BTA: but then again
CNP: continued [in my] next post
CID: crying in disgrace
CU: see you and CUL: see you later
CYA: see you and CYO: see you online
DBAU: doing business as usual
DW: dont worry
DD, DH, DS, DW: dear daughter, dear husband, dear son, dear wife
FML: F*** My Life and a popular site named, FMyLife.com
Similarly, FTW: for the win, For The World or f*** the world
FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt/Food
G2G or GTG: got to go