When most of my friends and I started getting our first cell phones, the most popular phone to have were still those phones that you had to 7 four times to write an "s." You were super cool if your parents bought you a slider phone with a QWERTY keyboard.
Because texting took so long, we, of course, used text-speech like "LOL" or "TTYL" or "WRU?"
"Are" was just the letter R and "you" was just the letter U. And this was acceptable at the time. Some of these acronyms followed us into present-day, but some just really need to be left in the past.
A boy recently texted me, sent from an iPhone, "How r u? Wryd?" and I honestly sat there for a few minutes utterly flabbergasted. An adult with a modern, top-of-the-class phone, really sent me a text message that looked like it was sent from 2010. I didn't even know iPhones, with Autocorrect that changed the simplest words to something so obscure, could even let you send a text like that!
There is a certain level of unattractiveness when people misuse "their/there/they're," but it goes to the next level when adults don't even bother to spell out a three-letter word. There is a sense of laziness and call me pretentious, but I just can't stand for laziness at this age. What does that say about a person when they don't even want to put forth the effort to do something as mundane as type out a full, coherent message?
A text message does not have to be written as a formal essay, fit with transitions and long SAT words to impress somebody. To me, if you're trying to impress someone, especially an adult, the message shouldn't look like it was written by a 12-year-old and make me want to answer back, "Smdh ttyl."
