May 27, 2009

Pssst parents: New online dictionary decodes text message lingo

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Some parents who RBTL are worried that text messaging is G4N and a WOTAM that has ruined their kids' ability to engage in D&M conversations, and has become a new tool for KPC. Other parents see texting as PANS and find NBIF to physicians' and psychologists' concerns that it may trigger "anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation," as The New York Times reported earlier this week.

In an effort to aid the texting illiterate (read: parents), LG Electronics MobileComm U.S.A., Inc., today launched DTXTR, a Wikipedia-like reference Web site with more than 2,000 texting acronyms and their meanings. (Of course, Netlingo also has a nifty glossary.) ASAMOF more than half of 1,000 teens and tweens surveyed by LG and research firm Interpret LLC indicated that they value the privacy of the texts more than of their e-mails and diary entries.

For these young texters, such an invasion of privacy is even worse than they imagine—31 percent of the teens surveyed believe their parents check their texts. In fact, 47 percent of 1000-plus parents surveyed by LG/Interpret said they had read their kids' texts without their consent. The message is clear: EVRE1 text AYOR, IYKWIMAITYD.

The Times, citing a Nielsen Company survey, reports that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the last quarter of 2008 (almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier). Another report, this one by Nielsen Telecom Practice Group, indicates that 77 percent of wireless subscriber lines in the U.S. subscribe to or purchase text-message capability.

Image ©iStockphoto.com/ Izabela Habur

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