IM culture ad if spellin mattrs or not ne more
I remember being somewhat blown away at the world of IM conversations when I started using it. Everyone was speaking in partial sentences, though most people still corrected their spelling mid conversation. LOL, hahaha, !?, :P, and all other similar speech elements became common in my typing, and expressing emotion was something that I found particularly frustrating about IM. I remember my teachers, parents, and others would always joke about how us kids were using computers all the time, wasting our time chatting with each other in broken english, etc. Well… Yes. We were, but who cared right? It doesn’t really matter does it? We know how to spell good.. And talk right…
It has been many years since AIM 1.0, and now I can chat with my boss if I’m at work, teachers, parents, (albeit using more formal speech patterns.) I’m used to my own level of informal IM speak, and I think I can generally understand most people within my peer group. And while certain misspellings are bizarre, their trendiness makes up for their inanity. For others this is not the case however. Today I can chat with my younger cousins and siblings, but the weirdest thing? (sigh… Note my fragment sentences) I get emails from them in broken english. If you can call it english. In the last 5-6 years I feel like what and how things are mispelled is totally different. When I get emails from younger family members, sometimes I write back with “Hey! speak english! please!” It makes me feel outdated. 
Funny. It has only been about six or so years and I have trouble understanding, let alone duplicating and communicating the same way. You’d think I could get to be 30 before I noticed anything like this happening. I guess that’s the same thing that happens in normal conversation, except I think people transition better from groovy, rad, tubular to sic, dank, ill, etc… At least in spoken communication you know what 90% of the weird things youngsters talk about it just the new way to say cool.
Tlak 2 you lader
Marco