OMG. I h8 that title, even though I chose it.
I was recently made fun of by my preteen for using <gasp> punctuation. She was being nosy, as this age group tends to be, and was leaning over my phone as I was texting someone.
“Why do you write it like that?” she chuckled.
“Like what?” I said.
“Like that. With periods and stuff. Nobody texts like that anymore.”
I was flabbergasted. Yes, I’ve seen text strings by her and her friends where five sentences become one long run-on sentence; no capitals, periods, commas, exclamation points or question marks to be found. It drives me crazy. But to be made fun of for not typing that way myself?! That left me speechless.
After posting about this ridiculous moment on my Facebook page, I was met with a string of comments from other moms my age saying they’ve also been made fun of by their kids for this! I may have teased my mom for her choice of clothes or hairstyle, but I don’t recall making fun of her when she was being grammatically correct! Can you imagine yourself as a 12-year-old watching your mom write a letter to her childhood friend and saying, “Haha. Why are you putting all those periods on the page and capitalizing the beginning of each sentence? That’s so weird.” I can’t either.
There are definitely acronyms I’ve gotten used to that have been around for quite some time like BRB, LOL and SMH. I think my generation may have created one of the first slang acronyms as I think back to all the middle school notes I passed that ended with LYLAS (love ya like a sister) to my girlfriends. Basic phrases being abbreviated make sense and are pretty easy to figure out on your own based on context of the actual words around it, but the other day I came across gloyt&p.
I was like…
Even after googling it and not finding it, I had to ask for help. It means “good luck on your test and paper.” I’m sure your teenager could have figured that out even if they had never seen it before. It’s almost as if Gen Z and Gen Alpha are creating a whole new language. In twenty years, I foresee people walking around literally just saying the first letter of each word they want to say and everyone their age understanding what they mean. Instead of Julie saying, “Hey Tom I will see you in the meeting at 3,” Julie will just be like, “H.T.I.W.S.Y.I.T.M.A.3.” And Tom will just reply to Julie with, “K.” Meanwhile, my generation (which will be the old fogeys by then), will be muttering under our breath at the loss of educational norms as we overhear these types of “conversations.” And Tom and Julie will secretly mock us old people for our use of full sentences and words. 
Obvi this whole post is J4F. I’m J/K about our kids not using real words. Luckily, my kids aren’t talking to me yet in acronyms…it seems to mainly stay in written form…that is until she thinks I’m being “sus” or “salty,” but we’ll save abbreviations and slang terms for another post. Acronyms alone is enough for today.
If you haven’t read this far then I guess it was TL;DR.
And if you need help deciphering my blog post, please seek assistance here.
GTG! TTYL!
