Webspeak

Webspeak is that weird language made up of abbreviations and acronyms and littered with emoticons, mainly used by the very young. The young, who are addicted to this language, are almost like a tribe apart. They have only one obsession: brevity of expression, in other words choosing only words and phrases that save time. They’ll change the spelling of a word for no other reason than that one letter is closer than another on the keyboard so their weary fingers have less far to travel! Which, of course, puts them one tenth of a second ahead of the rest of us. Aside from TTYL (“talk to you later”) and the inevitable LOL, “you are” becomes “ur”, “see” becomes “c”, and so on. But, hey, they need all their time for keeping up their blog on Skyrock, or listening endlessly to Tokio Hotel or Lady Gaga. In fact, they only communicate at all by texting, email and chatrooms, and rarely use their voices for the purpose. You can tell the really hard cases by their look: all-over fluorescent from baseball cap to trainers.

For severe addicts of webspeak, someone has even invented a new keyboard, the Bajca. All you do is connect it to your computer via USB, and you can use the 16 keys – or balls, really – of smileys and other pictograms, enough to saturate your messages. And, once you disconnect, the little balls will pop out so you can turn them into jewellery.