My son, Will, a youth ministry major at Mid-America Christian University, was giving me a tutorial so he could beat me at his latest favorite computer game from www.addictinggames.com.
Across the room his cell phone rang out with Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”
“Mom, that is a text. Can you read it to me?” said Will.
I flipped open the phone and read out loud. “W-T-F. What does that mean?”
Will kept his eyes on the screen. “The first two letters are for ‘what’ and ‘the.’ You can figure the rest out, Mom.”
I said, “I see.”
Will shrugged. “Everyone says WTF all the time at school now.”
Because my son is a freshman in college the language is not shocking. (I suppose the use of WTF is more civilized than saying the actual words.) I am not naïve about Christian schools, either. I attended one.
The thing that sent my brain in overdrive is how quickly “texting” is morphing our dialect.
Your Students Are Rotfl
“WTF” is an initialism, an abbreviation that is pronounced using the individual letters’ names rather than as a word. Granted, most initialisms will never end up in a dictionary. However, students even seem to be communicating verbally in textisms.
My students tell me that e-mail is out. All of these students have cell plans with unlimited text messaging, and they text their friends instead of using e-mail.
Most students prefer T9 or some similar “predictive text software” for mobile telephones. T9 stands for Text on 9 keys and uses an input technology with a dictionary of commonly used words that can be accessed by hitting the number key for the letter you need.
Another way of communicating is known as 1337 $p34k, or leetspeak. Leetspeak, sometimes spelled leetspeek or referred to just as leet, is a form of cipher, mostly used among gamers, that replaces letters with numbers or other characters. See its name, for example. The 1=L, 3=e, 7=t, and so on. Sometimes a letter will be constructed with more than one symbol, such as II for “n.” Leet (short for elite) is much more difficult to master because it’s dynamic and not static. The letter “S” can be represented by 5 or by $; there is no strict one-toone relationship between the source and cipher.
The texting is voluminous and dynamic. Trying to learn it can be overwhelming. Graciously, there are “leet translators” and Web sites to help us regain our vernacular ground; see wordspy.com, whatis.com, computerhope.com, and www.netlingo.com.
T9 and 1337$p34k aren’t good or evil in themselves. But they can’t be ignored. The issue for youth workers is being able to communicate effectively with their students in this text world. You and I need to be a 73x7iII& f00.
