Don’t Be Corrupted By Social Media Slang

What is Social Media Slang? Slang are informal words and language not associated with the standard/common language we use in society.

Social Media Slang is picked up mainly from communicating in Social Media. When communicating within Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter, you are often presented a short amount of space to relay information to convey to the other user involved.

Shortcuts, Abbreviations and L337 Speak are often concocted from the quick and short communication avenues.

Early Social Media Slang

Before Twitter and Facebook wall posts and status updates there was AOL and chat rooms with instant messaging.

AOL is known for the grand daddy of Internet slang creation and was the start of the early trendsetter of rapid short communication shortcuts. L33t Speak and Acronyms were heavily used back in the AOL days.

L337 Speak had AOL users writing words like:

// 0 n3 Y = Money

MiCrOsoFt = Microsoft

4 replaces A, 3 replaces E, 7 replaces T 1 replaces L, and $ replaces S, 13 replaces B are just a few more examples. L337 speak is still widely used in Video Games still.

Acronyms or the “Text Talk” is very popular still too. Some examples are below

U = You 2 = Too TTYL = Talk to you later LOL = Laughing out loud 4 = For R = Are O= OH

Corruption of the English Language

With chat rooms and instant messaging slowing losing traffic and more and more users are Texting and using Social Networks now to communicate, Internet Slang now has transformed to Social Media Slang.

These are English Teacher’s worst nightmares. These shortcut slang talk can corrupt your Business and Education.

Just because its easy to do to just “slang talk” or “text talk”, try to still practice good communication and not fall victim of Social Media Slang. You don’t want to write a proposal for a client that has this below:

“Hello wut do u want 2 do today? plz let me know, k, ttyl”

This of course is very unprofessional and can be detrimental to your etiquette. Although this seems like commons sense more and more professionals are caught with “Social Media Slang”

Just like with your personal profiles, keep your online etiquette very professional as well and don’t fall to the corruption of shortcuts and slang.