This one may not make you lol, but you could at least :)

A year or two back I wrote a column detailing the myriad ways in which I hate all the smileys, acronyms, abbreviations and sophomoric nomenclature that accompanies texting.

I thought, at the time, that terms like “lol” and “omg” were sounding the death knell for the English language. 

Look, I’m not a member of the language police and have zero tolerance for the Grammar Gestapo-types who can’t see beyond the basic rules of punctuation they learned in eighth grade. Sometimes, being ungrammatical is just the right thing to do. Ask anyone who does it for a living.

But even my lackadaisical attitude toward the language was put to the test when texting first became a “thing.” I’ll admit I was a little horrified when texting shortcuts started finding their way into emails, newspaper advertising and even the seven or eight actual paper and ink letters still written and mailed in the U.S. each year.

Since then, “textease” has wormed its way into virtually every avenue of communication. But I no longer mind. Writing “lol” really is a lot easier than typing, “My goodness! Your astute comment was so amusing that I simply cannot help but laugh out loud!”

I like easy.

Any of my ex-wives will be happy to tell you: I am the poster child for doing things the easy way. In fact, if a thing cannot be done easily, chances are I will not do it. I lack ambition, direction, discipline and a few other things my father undoubtedly pointed out after I had stopped listening sometime around my 14th birthday.

The point is, once I realized textease is easier than boring old English, I was more than happy to jump on board. What little regard I still had for good grammar went right out the window.

Before I knew it, I was peppering my communiques with things like :), lol, rotfl, omg and @. The first time I appended a :) to a text to my daughter (who, as far as I know, has completely lost the ability to hold a pen or speak aloud into a telephone) she responded with, “OMG dad! I can’t believe YOU used a smiley!!! LOL!!!” I’d never seen her so excited. Based on her response, you would think I had just demonstrated the ability to fluently converse in Sanskrit. 

From that point on, I was a convert. In fact, the only problem I still have with textease is that there simply isn’t enough of it. LOL, for instance. I see that one used all the time, but almost never in circumstances where someone would actually be laughing out loud. “I forgot to buy milk today! LOL!” Baloney! Nobody laughs out loud because he forgot to buy milk, not unless he’s an idiot.

Obviously, we need “shades” of lol. CQ, maybe, for Chuckling Quietly. SW, for Smiling Wryly. OPTLAYSJ, for Only Pretending To Laugh At Your Stupid Joke. Stuff like that.

Because of my aforementioned laziness, I won’t be the one compiling this textease dictionary, but someone should.

Once the language is fully developed, it could replace English altogether, save everyone a great deal of time and sound more modern in the process. Take the following example: “Yr 0oo0 have _ @ [] wood, @#$!! grn P* (_). M(o) are _@ n2 {} mud.”

That sounds SO much better than Yeats’ clumsy attempt at poetry: “Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing, My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”

Or maybe it doesn’t sound better. With all the lol I’ve been doing lately, it’s possible I’ve lost my objectivity. Oh, well, I’m sure it’ll all work out gr8! ;)

Mike Taylor’s ebook, “Looking at the Pint Half Full,” is available at Amazon.com. More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Check your text messages to find out

This morning over Cheerios I read yet another article about texting, the smart-phone phenomenon which allows communication via long distance without all the bother involved in using your mouth. Instead, you punch a whole bunch of little keys (either real or virtual) to send messages like “Ill se u ths aftrrrnon aroud 5,” which, allowing for typical texting typos, probably means, “The FBI has your house surrounded and they’re getting ready to toss in the tear gas canisters.”

The article didn’t mention typos, though. And for once it wasn’t another heated diatribe calling for the abolition of A) teenagers texting while driving, B) teenagers texting each other naked pictures, C) teenagers texting each other racy messages, or D) teenagers doing all the other fun stuff adults can’t do because our bodies are shot and we no longer look good naked, even on tiny cell-phone screens.

The article was about a recently-discovered behavior exhibited by some teens called sleep texting. That’s right, sleep texting.

So far Dr. Jason Coles—the “sleep medicine expert” cited in the story—has witnessed this behavior only in teens, but in time it’s sure to spread to older members of society. Sleep texting is exactly what it sounds like; texting in your sleep.

Now, I don’t know about you, but the text messages I receive—mostly from my kids, who don’t realize a phone also can be used for voice communication—are for the most part decipherable, if not exactly typo-free. This is not the case with sleep texting, according to Dr. Coles. Coles says texts created while “half awake, half asleep” can make no sense, some sense or more sense than the sender would likely be comfortable with.

In short, a sleep text may reveal a hidden truth. The same can probably be said of drunken texting, which people do all the time, at least the sort of people I hang out with. I don’t know how many “I love you, man!” texts I’ve received from my buddy Jake over the past three years, all of them sent sometime after 2:30 a.m. He usually goes on to describe how he’s going to kick my (expletive) if I don’t immediately get down to the A) bar, B) VFW Hall, or C) strip club to “hang” with him.

I hope this sleep texting thing doesn’t begin to affect Jake. I do not want to be privy to the abnormal thoughts percolating in his murky subconscious.

In fact, I don’t want to receive sleep texts from anyone. I’m sure my son’s subconscious is still mad at me over the time I smacked him upside the head for lipping off to his stepmother. (I’m not proud of it, but it happened.) And I know my daughter’s subconscious would have a few things to say about the time I yelled at her when she spilled grape juice all over the carpet while I was in the middle of hanging wallpaper. She was only five, but I yelled anyway and made her cry. I’ve felt guilty over that for years, but that doesn’t mean I want to read about it in the first chapter of her tell-all book, written entirely in her sleep.

My Sweet Annie’s phone has no text messaging capability and frankly, I’m glad. We had a quarrel last night and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what she was really thinking about me after the lights went out.

I don’t sleep text myself, but now I’m worried I might. I think I’ll leave my phone in the kitchen at night, just to be on the safe side. I have a few things I could say to a certain presidential candidate and I do not want the Secret Service showing up on my front porch at 4 a.m.

Your Kindle desperately wants a copy of Mike Taylor’s e-book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, available at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. If you’re still reading paper, you can buy a “real” copy of the book at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

If one more person tells me they’re ‘ROFL’ I’ll leave and never ‘BRB’

I’m a dinosaur. I’ll admit it. I’m proud of it, in fact. I am, apparently, one of the last people left alive who can communicate without symbols, acronyms or computer-generated “smileys.”

Since getting my new cell phone a couple months ago, I have learned to text nearly as fast as I type (which is pretty darn fast, lemme tell ya).

Now, many of you fellow dinosaurs out there no doubt wonder what the point of “texting” is, anyway. Why type a message when you could just call the person and say the same words out loud and in less time?

That’s a good question, and the answer is “search me.”

But the fact is a lot of people – mostly people 30 years old or younger – text a lot. My daughter texts me a dozen times a week, as do my son and stepson. And when they text me, half the message is in the language of “texteeze.” (Since I just invented the word I can spell it any way I choose!)

Texteeze is a language devised by young “texterz” (another word I just made up – yes, I like the letter “z”) to facilitate faster messaging on tiny, cell phone keyboards. Words like “you” are abbreviated to “u” and so on.

Words like “two,” “too,” and “to” are all expressed the same way – with the number “2.” Likewise, many other common phrases are truncated, abbreviated, or hammered into acronyms.

Thus, a message sent from President Obama’s Blackberry to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s iPhone (for instance) might read something like this: “Vlad! Pushed button! Oops! :( 2 many nukes 2 count. Off 2 bunker. BRB. ;)”

Putin’s reply might read: “ROFL! No, really. LMAO! UR such a joker! Hey, whts tht sound? Gotta check. BRB.”

Somehow, the situation’s fundamental gravitas is diminished. But that’s where the language is headed, mark my words! (“Mark my words” is a phrase we dinosaurs like almost as much as we do the letter “z.”)

All these little texteeze abbreviations also are rampant in the world of email messages. I get emails every week filled with ‘em, sometimes to the point that the message is all but indecipherable (at least by me).

For instance, my daughter sent me an email last week that read, “? @TEOTD or later 2nite could u CI w/me? WYWH! TTUL.”

What she meant was, “I have a question for you. At the end of the day or later tonight could you check in with me? Wish you were here. Talk to you later.”

It took me half an hour to figure out what my daughter was saying. By then she had tired of waiting for my reply and had simply made the voice call to tell me what she wanted.

As much as I hate texteeze, I hate “smileys” even more. If you have something to say to me that you think is funny, just say it! I will either laugh (if it’s funny) or won’t (if it’s not). I don’t need a symbol like :) to tell me how I’m supposed to feel about what you’ve written.

If you’re just kidding when you tell me I’m a putz, then say so, don’t just append a ;) to your comment and hope I’ll know what it means.

Oh, I know I’m fighting a losing battle here. The future (and the future of the language) belongs to the young, not dinosaurs like me. I may be TBE (Thick Between the Ears), but even I can see the shape of things to come.

Younger readers probably don’t see the problem here, but for dinosaurs like me, it is TEOFTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It).

CU.

Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.