Social Media Abbreviations

More and more of us, become more and more adept with, more and more social media options all the time!  The increase in speed of communication has been nothing short of a revolution over the past couple of decades.  Do people even write letters anymore?! The fax machine I relied on so heavily, whizzing news back home to family when I first moved to Dubai 13 years ago, is now obsolete.  And I’m now in danger of a repetitive strain injury from my Blackberry affliction; rarely out of sight.  Responding to emails or sms; it’s all immediate – dexterous thumbs a-blur. Facebook, first embraced by the young, quickly followed by the rest of the world, was never about perfectly grammatical phraseology. English teachers despair... (but keep their FB pages updates). The forum phenomena grew at the same time and those who regular post pick up shorthand tips which leave casual observers a little abused as to what they’re talking about.  But maybe that’s part of the appeal; to stand apart as the knowing ‘in crowd’.  At this point I’m tempted to invent RMETTC (roll my eyes to the ceiling). The popularity of Twitter, with its 140 character limit, has led to even greater use of TLAs (three letter acronyms) and abbreviations.  And if you’re doing all this in a second language, as many are, it must be all the more confusing.  Here are a few common, and less common, ones that you may have seen in use and didn’t like to ask. We’d still recommend you use sparingly if you want to be understood. And yes we know there are rude ones too but that would be TMI...

See the list of abbreviations