The initialism LLAS, meaning “love you like a sister,” isn’t a texting phenomenon—it goes back 30 or 40 years to when girls would write each other letters. This is part of a complete episode.
Do you say terms like NBD, LOL, or BRB aloud in everyday speech? It sounds strange to hear spoken text lingo, but with all language, it’s only weird until it becomes the norm, and then we wonder how we did without it. That said, most of these...
Twitter’s 140-character format has made way for a whole new brand of comedy writing. See Judah Friedlander: “More than one company should be allowed to sell Monopoly,” or Stephen Colbert: “It doesn’t always pay to get...
How much humor and personality can you pack into a 140-character update? A lot, it turns out. Martha and Grant talk about funny Twitter feeds. Also this week, the origins of skosh and “can’t hold a candle,” why dragonflies are...
Predictive text on cellphones can result in some amusing accidental substitutions. The word for that: textonym. This is part of a complete episode.
OMG, text messaging! It’s destroying the English language, corrupting young minds, turning us into illiterates. It’s probably shrinking the ozone layer, too. Or is it? In his new book, Txting: The Gr8 Db8, David Crystal offers a...