tx me l8r if u want

I'm guilty. I text almost as much as I talk. I like it because it's so casual. Effortless. Easy to communicate with someone without imposing and easy to decline an invitation without hearing disappointment in the invitees voice. (I assume anyways, because people turn me down all the time with texts - I'm starved for friendship (j/j). And up until lately, I typed shorthand with the best of them. C = see, U = you, @ = at, 2 = too, to, or two. But now with my new phone, there's an entire keypad and it's just as easy to type out the whole thing as it is type in shorthand. So now, this encourages me to use uppercase and punctuation where appropriate. Which has, in turn, spilled over into how I write emails. Which is good because I'm already terrible at spelling and grammar, and texting was just taking me further down.
I have a friend who's a high school English teacher and she says she gets papers all the time that are written in short hand. She says the kids freely replace 's' with 'z' and write out acronym after acronym of perceived gibberish.
Until I came across this article I had no idea there was so much short hand out there. It's pretty daunting. And maybe it's because I'm no spring chicken and texting has only entered my life as an adult, but a lot of this short hand just annoys me. Oops, there went my few remaining cool points. I've officially entered the "uncool, lady zone" as far as teens are concerned. I may as well perfect my battle cry, "Turn that music down!" lol!
Here's a grain of examples from the sands of shorthand and acronyms.