Science of Text Abbreviations

It seems like in this world, where we are moving in a world faster than anybody has ever seen, we are forced to do multiple things at once, texting while showering while brushing your teeth, for instance. But as a person who has actually attempted to text while showering while brushing my teeth, it is extremely hard to do these things all at once.

You might have heard someone speak like this: "It is in a world like this, so fast-paced and busy, and so many things happening through online spaces, that we have developed a culture of abbreviating the things we have to say. Grammar and proper sentences are abhorrently ignored and set to the side, being replaced with phrases such as "laugh out loud" and "be right back". And we reduce our lives even further to letters: "lol" and "brb". If one stage of abbreviation wasn't enough."

I used to be one of these people. Even as a kid, I hated times when my friends would respond in these ways, even in scenarios where their hands and time were fully available or reasonable to type out a full word or sentence. For instance, I remember learning what "smh" meant for the first time. When I realized that "smh" was widely used to replace the word "no", I scoffed. "Smh" had one more letter than "no", which, unlike the former, would be a straight answer for everyone. Was it cooler to type in abbreviations, even if it meant costing rationality and even more characters? As much as I despised text abbreviations, I also wanted to learn more about the dawn of their existence. Although I had lived through abbreviations in texting, my parents had lived through abbreviations in paging, where they had to use similarly nonsensical abbreviations to fight the numerical barrier that was ingrained in the technology of paging.

The SMS Language, or the texting language, has been used for centuries, even before the dawn of computers and the texting age. In the age of telegraphs, many words were shortened as telegraph messaging was charged based on character count. Instead of reducing words to letters, however, messengers often removed unnecessary vowels or consonants that served no purpose in denoting the word itself. This often resulted in words such as "about" and "week" being shortened into "abt" and "wk".

As telegraphs were the most advanced and widely used form of communication at the time, besides mail, the changes in language were quite significant in terms of how they shaped the culture of communication. With that said, however, all of the alterations made in this era were based on practicality, such as limiting the number of characters as much as possible to fill the limit and pay less. 

The same principle applied to paging. Since the first pagers only had a numerical keypad, messages that would normally make sense as words were forced to be converted to expressions formed entirely of numbers. In contrast to telegraphs, the "booms" of which differed by region and were mainly used in Europe, the use of pagers globalized much more quickly. This resulted in many more "phrases" in multiple different languages. In English, most phrases consisted of numbers, which denoted the number of letters in each word. For instance, the phrase "I love you" was "143" as there is one letter in "I", four letters in "love", and three letters in "you". Singular words, such as "Hello", were often represented in letters that resembled the word flipped upside down, resulting in "07734". In Korea, the sounds of the words themselves contributed to the translation to pager speak. For instance, the phrase "Come on, quick" is "8282", which resembles the pronunciation of the actual Korean phrase: "빨리빨리".

When text messages came around, they possessed the same sort of limit. At the dawn of SMS messaging, a single message was limited to 160 characters. Like telegraphs, this meant that fitting this limit as well as getting a point across using the fewest number of characters possible was always the priority. However, with the advent of smartphones, text messaging reached many more younger people, especially teens and those in their 20s, resulting in a much more modernized shift in language that suited this demographic. Common phrases such as "laughing out loud" and "rolling on the floor laughing" turned into "lol" and "rofl". But this still does not explain why, even after the disappearance of the character limit, the text abbreviations used still stay the same.

The truth is, text messaging is somewhat different from other forms of communication. In truth, paging only existed for about 10 years. Not many older people, part of the mail generation, knew about it at the time. However, unlike paging, texting has remained unchanged for the last 25 years. As more and more of the older generation pass, and more of the new generation adopt text messaging as their primary source of communication, the language used at the dawn of messaging, when limitations existed, continues to be used. Thus, text abbreviations take a natural course of evolution, where the abbreviations themselves orient themselves to the faster-paced and media-focused world of today. In a quite uncanny example, I found "TLDR", or "Too long to read", to be directly related to the faster days of today, where most people are invested in other tasks to be reading long passages. It is almost eerie and scary to think that text messaging is aging and developing with us. 

But perhaps the most crucial part of why abbreviations in messaging sit on a completely different plane is the linguistic differences. While telegraph and pager speak were abbreviated to shorten or convert a word or phrase, SMS speak exists purely to simplify. Unlike previous forms, it has no strict pattern, follows no rules in terms of practicality, and can even be nonsensical. While pager and telegraph speak have certain purposes, a person can abbreviate their text without having a specific purpose. It is this unbound and free form of speech that makes it so widespread and such a staple in communication.

Sure, this doesn't quite explain why receiving text abbreviations is so annoying, even to people who partake in them all the time. But at least we know that the fault is not ours; it is the changing world, the flexibility of language, and the changing standards of norms in communication that allow us to speak like this.