Internetweb speak
It’s disturbing to think how rapidly technology is affecting language. Normally I try to fight the onslaught, although too much ironic use of l33t has left me being able to read and write it fluently (and if you don’t know what l33t is be very very thankful), but even with my limited adoption of internet acronyms and emoticons I find myself making assumptions and using words for their [very] modern meaning.
Take, for example, last night. I put in an email that I was ‘chatting with some friends’. To me that would imply talking to people via an instant messaging program and adding the qualifying ‘on the internet’ would simply be a redundant tautology. It took a few hours to dawn on me that someone might construe that as me having some friends physically round my house [don't laugh, it has been known to happen 
] as, to be fair, that is the proper meaning of the word. Hopefully the line in question is innocuous enough that either interpretation doesn’t matter. Still, at least I never use the constructs [as these are certainly not words] ‘10q‘ (thank you), ‘plz‘ (please - and where the hell did the ‘z’ come from?) and ‘ne1‘ (anyone) which are my 3 biggest interwebnet pet peeves. Anyone feeling as though they should be using any of those, or similar, I only have one thing to say to you: lrn2type
I don’t mind “plz” as it’s phonetically closer, and if you’re going to abandon spelling, wtf?
What I hate is people using @ to mean ‘a’ instead of ‘at.’
Such people are tw@s, imnsho.
l33t? Sorry for being totally thick!
I hate people who don’t type texts out in full as well…
e7ee7sp34!|< |=0|? 73|-| \/\/1// - and if you can read that you need to get laid
(yes, I desperatly need to get laid 
)
HEEEEEEEELPPP - God, I’m turning into my mother! lol
No - you’re right to be scared. I’ve been bombarded with this crap for years and can only just keep up (not that you’d want to). Be afraid, be very afraid.
You’ve lost it young man. Really.
Not that I can’t read it, just that I think you may have fallen out of date…