I keep my grammar well rehearsed...

Last Friday I had the wonderful opportunity to join some former colleagues/current friends for lunch. It was my first experience with Indian food, which proved to be interesting. My special thanks go to Nick for showing me the way of such ethnic meals. (At this point, it would be appropriate to also give a shout out to Dan, Luke, and Jeremy in thanks for a nice time - not that any of them read this.)

These guys are all analysts, so as I'm sure you can imagine, there were several interesting points of conversation throughout the meal. The most noteworthy of which had to be the heated debate on contemporary language, specifically the phenomenon known as "textspeak." I happen to be ANTI "textspeak." When I text, I tend to spell words completely and use mostly complete sentences. There are few exceptions. I also have very little patience in "textversations" with people who use text abbreviations, especially "u" for "you" and "r" for "are." In fact, I've taken to just disregarding most texts that use those abbreviations. I simply ignore them. No response.

Dan and Jeremy both agreed that they also spell words completely in their texts, whereas Luke was the leader of the "textspeak" argument. Dan, of course, played plenty of Devil's (read: "textspeak") advocate though. All of this leads me to the argument Luke (and Dan) made for "textspeak."

The argument: "Language is always changing and evolving. By using abbreviations, we are able to communicate more efficiently. We don't communicate the same way people did 100 years ago, and 100 years from now we will be communicating differently."

My thoughts: While this is a seemingly valid point, it doesn't cover all the problems that I have with "textspeak." Here are a few issues:
1. "Textspeak" is still not used in a professional atmosphere. This alone should speak to the not only informal, but also uneducated feel it has.
2. Anytime you shorten or simplify language, you take away some of its meaning. This creates more ambiguity and less clarity in messages.
3. Come on, it just looks AND sounds (or reads, I guess) ignorant. Besides, how much space do you really save by shortening two and three letter words? I'm okay with acronyms for longer phrases and even occasionally "bc" for "because" if a lack of space warrants the use.
4. Do we really want to keep "dumbing down" our diction? Is this really the direction we want society to be moving? Think about it. How will we be represented through our communications? "OMG, ur so funny. L8R." Gross.

That's all. I'll step down from my soap box now.