I wrote 2U B4! British Library shows up textspeak as soooo 19th century

New exhibition features Victorian poems written like text messages, the rise of RP, and battles over the letter H

Mark Brown Arts correspondent

guardian.co.uk

A typical text message on a mobile phone. The British Library has unearthed examples of 19th century language using text msg abbreviation. GR8!

If u really r annoyed by the vocabulary of the text generation, then a new exhibition at the British Library should calm you down. It turns out they were doing it in the 19th century – only then they called it emblematic poetry, and it was considered terribly clever.
Details were announced today of the library's new exhibition devoted to the English language, exploring its 1,500-year history from Anglo-Saxon runes and early dictionaries to not dropping your Hs and rap.
The exhibition will open this winter after three years of planning.
One of the stars of the show will be the oldest surviving copy of Beowulf, the longest epic poem in Old English, which was written down at least 1000 years ago. There will also be the first book ever printed in English, which, reassuringly perhaps, has inconsistent spelling. The French are both "frensshe" and "frenshe" in Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, published by William Caxton in Flanders around 1473.
Roger Walshe, the British Library's head of learning, said it had been "a hugely ambitious project for us, but a hugely enjoyable one as well". He added: "There is always interest in language and there are always debates about whether language is changing or declining or improving and also what is influencing language. We felt we were uniquely placed to be able to give a historical perspective to that debate."

Linguistics: Speaking of Space

published on: Time

America's leap into space has stimulated science and spawned new industries. It has also created a new idiom: space-speak. Many a scientist finds the growing, and sometimes incomprehensible jargon essential to the simplest conversation about new devices and techniques. But many a layman has become convinced that it is only one more irritating and unnecessary obstacle looming between him and a better grasp of scientific accomplishment. In a detailed analysis of space-speak for the magazine Science, University of Michigan Psychologist David McNeill suggests that there is something to be said for both points of view.
Creativity Limitation. Such space-speak metaphors as "umbilical" (the cord connecting a space-walking astronaut to his craft) and "milk stool" (the arrangement of a missile's three rocket engines) are vital additions to the language, says McNeill. He is equally impressed by such metonyms as "eyeballs in" and "eyeballs out" (describing extreme conditions of acceleration and deceleration, respectively), and he approves of neologisms such as "rockoon" (a rocket launched from a balloon). Unfortunately, metaphors, metonyms and neologisms—and the creativity required to invent them—are limited. They constitute only about one-eighth of the entries in official NASA diction aries of space terms.
Most of the remaining space jargon, according to McNeill's analysis, is made up of "nominal compounds"—words strung together endlessly in what scientists consider a logical order to describe complex devices or systems. Controlling the attitude of a ship by ejecting gas through nozzles, for instance, is called "nozzle gas ejection ship attitude control." The longest nominal compound discovered by McNeill appeared in the Congressional Record, and sounded as if it had been translated literally from the German: "liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen rocket powered single stage to orbit reversible boost system."
Such unwieldy compounds, McNeill says, constitute 19% of all the words in written NASA reports—substantially more than he found, for example, in papers by psychologists (8%) or in articles by educators (3%). But they are also used extensively by non-space scientists, "apparently to meet the common need for technical terms in greater numbers than metaphors, metonyms or neologisms can supply."
Possessive Pretension. On the other hand, McNeill stresses, the compound is often used to extremes, especially by those who pretend to possess a degree of technical knowledge that they do not have. Establishing a "pretension index" based on the length of nominal compounds and their frequency of use, he discovered that in their speeches, members of Congress were even more compound-conscious than NASA engineers. A space-technology magazine was a worse offender. It printed 300% more six-word compounds than did written NASA reports.
Even the engineering mind has begun to boggle at the profusion of space-speak—which explains the reduction of some complex nominal compounds to straightforward acronyms. "Augmented target docking adapter" has become ATDA, "astronaut maneuvering unit" is known as AMU, and the "electronic ground automatic destruct sequencer" —used to blow up missiles that have gone astray—is known simply as EGADS.
More detailed study of space-age jargon would be beneficial, McNeill feels, and his report must be considered only preliminary. "But we can conclude," he says, "that the following statement is probably true: Space-speak is an engineering technology concept expression manuscript sentence grammar device."

Geek Speak

Have you ever been at a party with a bunch of "software industry" people and overheard a conversation that included something like this:
"I was sitting in the cube farm checking out the dead tree edition of the Times when some idea hamster comes in to ask for my help on a project. I told him I didn't have enough bandwidth to support him--that he should go find some gray matter to help him out."
Sound like a different language? It is. An entire lexicon of "geek speak" has emerged from the world of hardware and software. But the next time you feel left out at a party full of mouse potatoes, you can show your savvy by speaking the lingo. If you do it well enough, you might even be mistaken for the alpha geek.

Alpha geek: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. "Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek around here."

Bandwidth: The ability to juggle or handle an excessive amount of stuff. "I'm really busy and don't have the bandwidth to dedicate to your issue right now."

Cobweb site: A World Wide Web site that hasn't been updated for a long time. A dead Web page.

Cube farm: An office filled with cubicles.

Dead tree edition: The paper version of a publication available in both paper and electronic forms, as in: "The dead tree edition of the San Francisco Chronicle..."

Doorstop: A computer that is no longer considered fast enough or to contain insufficient storage, etc. for use in normal work. All 286's and 386's are doorstops. Most 486's are now doorstops. Soon we'll see Pentium doorstops.

Egosurfing: Scanning the net, databases, print media, or research papers looking for the mention of your name.

Gray matter: Older, experienced business people hired by young entrepreneurial firms looking to appear more reputable and established.

Idea hamsters: People who always seem to have their idea generators running.

Keyboard plaque: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards. "Are there any other terminals I can use? This one has a bad case of keyboard plaque."

Let's take this off-line: Let's talk about this later, after the meeting.

Liveware: Slang for people. Also called wetware or jellyware, as opposed to hardware, software, and firmware.

Mouse potato: The online, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

Nonlinear Inappropriately intense negative response. "I told him we didn't have any Starbucks' Gazebo Blend and he went totally nonlinear."

Ppen-collar: workers People who work at home or telecommute.

Plug-and-play: A new hire who doesn't need any training. "The new guy, John, is great. He's totally plug-and-play."

Randomize: To divert someone from his or her goal with tertiary tasks or niggling details. "Marketing has totally randomized me by constantly changing their minds about the artwork."

Stress puppy: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

Total disconnect: An extremely low-bandwidth human interaction. "It was a total disconnect. I spent half an hour explaining how this stuff worked, and he just didn't get it."

Uninstalled: Euphemism for being fired.

published on: mainframe.org

Puns, put-down and fresh coinages from the white-hot furnace of e-culture

What do you call the loss of productivity caused by too much time spent on Facebook? "Social notworking." A steeply devalued retirement account? "201(k)." A painfully obsolete cellphone? "Brickberry."

These linguistic dispatches from the land of cooler-than-you come courtesy of wit-mongers Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago-headquartered full-service agency with a tidy billion dollars in annual billables. C-K's notable accounts include Corona beer, AirTran Airways, Levitra and Porsche -- which sounds like a recipe for a wild weekend in Fort Myers, Fla.
For the second year, the firm has published its Cultural Dictionary of the zeitgeist-iest words and phrases, pulling together -- as only an office full of droll and snarky hipsters can -- the slang, puns, put-downs and freshly minted coinages from the white-hot furnace of electronic culture. It's pretty hilarious.
To wait impatiently while the SMS system catches up, for example, is to be "textually frustrated." "Baling out" is F-bombing a helpless underling a la Christian Bale; "Blago" here appears as an expletive, as in "Holy Blago, Christian Bale really Blagoed the pooch!" Some entries are simply Web wastrels, such as "pwn" (to triumph utterly over another) and "gr7" (pretty good, but not gr8). Hit your teenagers with these and watch their eyes narrow with suspicion, or is that respect?
And yet many of C-K's entries offer real insight, even wisdom, to a consumer culture constantly trying to figure itself out.
The first question, though, is why an ad agency would bother. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure famously wrote, "There is no thought without words" . . . sort of. Actually, he wrote, "La pensee, chaotique de sa nature, est forcee de se preciser en se decomposant." Which I translate as, "Thought, naturally chaotic, becomes concrete and precise in the framing of language."

Source: Ihavenet

Learning to speak Generation Millenial

The buzz has a solution to help Baby Boomer or Generation X mangers who "just don't understand the 20-something workers these days with their constant need for praise and their fascination with posting snippets of their lives on YouTube."
Maybe you're using the wrong language to get their attention.
Advertising agency Cramer-Krasselt has compiled a 2008 Cultural Dictionary of new words and phrases culled from magazines, Web sites, blogs and conversations.

Next time you encounter a member of the Millennial Generation, try incorporating these:

Bacn: impersonal e-mails (as annoying as spam) that you have chosen to receive, such as alerts and newsletters.

Bershon: that angry/bored/too-cool-to-care look that 12- to 18-year-olds sport in every family photo.

Compunicate: to chat with a co-worker when you are in the same room using Instant Messenger instead of speaking to them in person.

Defriend: to remove somebody from your established list of contacts, considered the ultimate snub on a social network.

Lifestreaming: posting an online record of a person's daily activities, such as blogs.

Meatspace: referring to real life or the physical world and conceived as the opposite of cyberspace or virtual reality.

Moofer: derived from the acronym for "mobile out of office." Someone who abandons their workplace between meetings, taking laptop and Blackberry to the local Starbucks or anyplace else where they can escape the interruption of talkative co-workers.

Passion bucket: a metaphor for a job or endeavor that can fulfill one's sense of mission and ambition.

Peachfuzz billionaires: when someone launches their first startup in middle school and ends up a budding teeny mogul on the cover of a magazine.

Porntastic: something great, but slightly edgy and racy.

Palm Beach niece: it's a term that an older man might use to introduce or describe a much younger female companion.

published on: AZCentral.com

Facebook speak: Teenagers create secret online language

Teenagers on social networking sittes are creating a secret language to stop adults knowing what they are up to, researchers say.

published on: Telegraph

The teens are using it to stop parents and employers judging them by their social activities such as partying and drinking.Instead of writing they are drunk, teens post 'Getting MWI' - or Mad With It.
Being in a relationship is known as 'taken' or 'Ownageeee', and 'Ridneck', a corruption of redneck, means to feel embarassed.
Meanwhile, girls posting 'Legal' are indicating that they are above 16 and legally allowed to have sex.
Lisa Whittaker, a postgraduate student at the University of Stirling, who studied teens aged 16-18 on Bebo in Scotland, said the slang had been created to keep their activities private, and cited the example of one young girl who was sacked after bosses found pictures of her drinking on the website.
"Young people often distort the languages they use by making the pages difficult for those unfamiliar with the distortions and colloquialisms," she said.
"The language used on Bebo seems to go beyond abbreviations that are commonly used in text messaging, such as removing all the vowels.
"This is not just bad spelling, which would suggest literacy issues, but a deliberate attempt to creatively misspell words.
"The creation and use of their own social language may be a deliberate attempt to keep adults from understanding what is written on the page.
"By doing this they are able to communicate with their in-group and conceal the content from the out-group. This further adds to their online identity."
She said that one reason for encoding their messages was to keep adults in the dark about their drinking or smoking. She is due to present her research at a seminar at the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data and Methods in Cardiff on Tuesday.