The Steve Rubel Stream

SMS was quite popular before twitter, and encourages the same sort of vowel-dropping and shorthand. LOL, brb, ROTFL, WTF?, KTHXBAI... and the list goes on. English teachers were already commenting on the use of SMS shorthand in student's papers before twitters rise to prominence in the last several years. I suspect it is not so much twitter changing the language as twitter feeding into the same trend.

Yeah, SMS should take the credit for this. It took a long time to catch on in the States but has been huge in Europe for over a decade. If anything, that kind of shorthand language is frowned upon on Twitter, despite the tweet limitations. And when Twitter finally gives us proper filters, I suspect a lot of us will never see that stuff in our streams again. ;)

Twitter, of course, would get credit for RT, but I can't see it catching on in speech. How would you even use it in 'real life'? There's a comedy spoof waiting to be written here about some friends at a pub, and one 'retweets' the first one's speech to the others, ad infinitum.

I could see RT saving us some syllables. Watch:

"Hey Joe, I was talking with Steve, and he told me that the written word is being butchered."

"Hey Joe, RT Steve the written word is being butchered."

Look at how much more concise my speech becomes!

Congrats on doing such a great job on your blog!

"about how much as the telegraph changed writing back", Interesting, weird grammar quoted.

Too early to tell if there will be a lasting effect on language. Concise is good.

IDK, my BFF Jill?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nIUcRJX9-o

ILLFIGURED: I can't for the life of me figure some of these out, but I love it!

I always think about this. Yes, the language of Twitter is changing @Twitter itself: hashtags, @replies etc. and the language of what were doing but more importantly, what were thinking. The more we use Twitter and think and learn from it, the more the language will change. Also, I think as more corporations take on Twitter, the language will change as well (eg. Kodak at #140conf and the word Twanker, which is now added into the Twitter dictionary I believe....i have a lot to say about this but I think Steve or other bloggers can do something amazing in this area. A topic worth exploring further - awesome stuff!

140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form (Paperback):
http://www.amazon.com/140-Characters-Style-Guide-Short/dp/0470556137/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_cart_4

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