Twitter Talk

It is becoming an epidemic in our society. With all of our new social networking and other technology for quick and simple communication, people are starting to use abbreviations or shortened, butchered versions of words to get their point across faster and in fewer characters. But now it is crossing from the world of the computer and phone screens into everyday conversation. When will it end? Pretty soon our conversations will be co
mposed of various letter/number/symbol combos lacking even one legitimate word! Can anyone say 1984?

Anyway, I will get off my soapbox and get to the point. I like to refer to this as twitter talk: language used by lazy, over-teched people. My students have been using quite a bit of it lately, so I'll give you some highlights.

1) Today I had to talk with a couple of students about a situation that occurred while I was on vacation. One student kicked another student out of their group and made him feel pretty bad. So here is a portion of that conversation.

Me.: P., what happened?

P.: Well, Ms. Hammer, T. and C. asked if they could join our group and we were like, totes, we are friends with everyone, so we don't have any problems with you joining our group. Then T. and C. got in a fight and C. kicked T. out of the group and that's what happened.

And there you have it. Tow-tow-inapro-pro, but totes true :)

 2) Me: H., why do you think Mark Twain wrote this into his novel?

H: I. D. K.

Me: Hold up, did you just spout out letters at me because not only do you not know the answer, but you can't even muster the brain power to form the words to express your lack of knowledge?????!

H: ha ha ha...yeah...

#if you haven't seen the Jimmy Fallon/Justin Timberlake hashtag
spoof--WATCH IT!

3) My students were working on discussion questions together when I overheard one group who had veered completely off task.

B: I can't believe it! I was like 'hashtag,' what the crap!? You know?

Seriously? #get to work #oh, the rising generation #I don't get paid enough.