
It was this license plate that caused the following rant.
Throughout my illustrious career of spouting off opinions with little to no thought to the consequences, one of the biggest topics of dissent has been my general dislike towards text-speak. I’ve touched upon it in a past blog, did my own research on it in grad-school, and regularly tease people online for using it – as well as those who send me text-messages.
You know what I’m referring to, right? Ppl who think itz kool 2 write like this; who use abbreviations like LOL, WTF, OMG, and YOLO; who replace full words with single letters. Oh. And I should probably add that I find emoticons quite annoying as well.
I’ve talked to teachers who have noted the disturbing trend of students who find it acceptable to include these abbreviations on homework and in papers. Many of those same students also have issues with basic sentence structure and writing out complete thoughts – presumably because they grew up in world where text messages and 140 character tweets are the norm.
Language evolves, I get that. Adapting communication to technology and still being able to get the point across is important. You’ll get no argument from me. Some will further point out that for anyone to communicate effectively with text-messaging shorthand, they have to already possess a solid grasp of the broader language itself. Ok, maybe.
The good news is that more and more people are using smart-phones. As a result, this way of ‘talking’ seems to be diminishing. The bad news is that an entire generation has already been raised using text-speak and are now starting to breed.

Your name is 4Real? Could always be worse. It could be Superman!
Take Pat and Sheena Wheaton of New Zealand, for example. These dumb asses wanted to name their child “4Real”. When the government ultimately told them that was not possible, they gave their son the legal name of Superman. (Although they still refer to the someday-double-murderer as 4real.)
R U serious? Y? WTF is wrong with U?
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m becoming old-fashion. And maybe my intolerance for stupidity shouldn’t include this topic, yet here we are.
I promise to try and do better in the future.
</endRant>