Thursday, May 31, 2007

Instant Messaging Acronyms

Last week our Verizon DSL line died one night, and I needed to call tech support to get it all fixed. Unfortunately, usually I get the tech support number from the Verizon website, and that clearly wasn't gonna happen. So I dug up the initial stuff they snail-mailed when we started the service. In the booklet with the contact numbers I noticed a special section called "Instant Messaging Acronyms."
It is filled with all sorts of helpful "commonly used acronyms" you can use to "save time" whilst chatting with family and friends. Things like, "LOL," "BTW" and "IMHO." However, it is also filled with all sorts of wild acronyms that I've never seen before. Now, I don't consider myself an expert on IM acronyms, and it's possible that new ones have been developed recently, and that I'm an old fogey by IM standards, but: Have any of you ever seen "PMFJI," "SSINF" or "OTTOMH?"
And then they go and get a few classics totally wrong. For example, "WTH." The family-friendly Verizon acronym page writing people just couldn't bring themselves to put "WTF" in their little guidebook. "WTH," they claim, stands for "What the heck?"
WTH? WTF?!? You've gotta be kidding me! Even Google knows better than to let you search for WTH:

4 comments:

  1. Pardon me for jumping in, but Eli, I would like to point out that even really, really old fogies like Dave Barry know what PMFJI means. He describes it in Dave Barry in Cyberspace, along with IMHO and LOL and ROTFL. That book come out over ten years ago. Now admittedly I have never seen anyone say PMFJI since, but still you should be ashamed of yourself.

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  2. What's scarier the first hit on the page is for West Tennessee Home. I live in West Tennessee........

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  3. The are clearly missing the very important thx, used in this sentence for example:
    kthx

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  4. No, no it's there. Check photo two. Or check out our webpage for the deluxe edition featuring all those and more.

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