By Karen E. Peterson
No SOS for SMS in these stormy economic waters.
SMS, for Short Messaging Service, is the hottest thing to hit the screen since, well, email.
Also known as text-messaging or, simply, texting, the name doesn't really matter, or the platform, or carrier. It is a worldwide phenomenon, bred in the Nordic countries, now in the U.S. – and all that counts, really, is the fact that, like internet mail, m-mail can be sent, received and read just about anytime and anywhere.
That said, it's also a fairly clumsy way of communicating. After all, those small screens that hold short messages are equipped with equally petite keyboards that aren't really keyboards at all. At least not like QWERTY-based keyboards computers and handhelds use.
Pressing the Message Home
SMS messages have to be composed using a telephone keypad that lumps letters under numbers. Even with the most recent popular phones, users still have to press-press-press No. 6 and press-press-press-press No. 7 and press-press-press No. 3 and press No. 2 and press-press-press No. 7 again and press-press-press-press No. 7 yet one more time to type in Oscars ...
It's a lot easier to compose SMS using thumbs, too, which could be one reason SMS, so far, is a youthful pursuit. Their thumbs, thanks to electronic game experience, are agile.
You can also thank young SMSers for a new vocabulary that has sprung up just for mobile communiques. This new way of communicating tosses out email smiley faces – and enhances the idea of acronyms and spelling shortcuts.
Good News for Linguists
Some decry this new way of spelling as yet another sign of decay in the overall world of the written word. Others, like Donna Jo Napoli, professor and chair of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, see it as a "delight."
"It's wonderful that people are playing with words," she said.
For Napoli, the emergence of any new language is an opportunity for study. It's also a good sign that language isn't dead, but evolving. In this case, the evolution is global and cross-cultural.
Napoli says that "if the shorthand does not correspond to how we all talk, it won't work. Cutesy and annoying won't catch on."
Also intriguing to linguists, says Napoli, is the still unanswered question: whose language will we ultimately pick "to express ourselves globally."
Good Things in Small Packages
Not only are screens small, carriers only allow a certain number of characters to be sent via SMS. That number varies. Outside the U.S., the character count can be upwards of 160 – note that the count includes characters and the spaces between characters. In the U.S., the count varies between 100 and 120 characters.
Upshot: that's why SMSers have turned to shorthand. Shorthand is basically just that: snippets of language combined into often times clever acronyms to express thoughts and salutations.
Here's a test: If you know what BCNU or AFAIK or BD or GMAB or the sigh of relief that ZP can command, then you don't need to read further.
If you're stumped, then click here to see a list of SMS shorthand. It's just FYA anyway ...
