News

Txt talk crps in2 evday lang

The TLAs and slang terms are growing in numbers.

11 Dec 2008

The Post Office has embarked on an education mission to held befuddled Brits unravel the complexities of language as tech slang terms and almost nonsensical descriptors creep increasingly into our everyday speech.

We're all familiar with the annoying and frustrating 404 error the internet often throws back at us usually when we need to do something really quickly but now, its becoming commonplace as a term meaning clueless.

Similarly, 'code 35' apparently means that you're broke and the numbers 143 mean, simply I love you'.

Jonathon Green, a lexicographer and author of The Chambers Slang Dictionary,' has worked with the Post Office to create a guide to 21st century tech chat to help both technophobes and technophiles decipher terms.

"Over the last ten years, the emergence of mobile phones and the internet has made it easier than ever before for us to communicate in short written messages. In fact, writing out words in full seems to have turned into a bit of a bother," he said.

"As the English language shifts into cyber language, TLAs are cropping up all over the place. Whether it's a text message, an instant messenger conversation, emails, social networking sites such as Facebook or internet forums, people are cutting corners and trying to say as much as they can in as few letters as possible. We're seeing new abbreviations appear almost every day and when new events come along such as the credit crunch' new terms spring up left, right and centre as we try to make sense of events by creating a language to describe them."

The post office guide is available here.