Shorthand and Social Media – A Luv-H8 Relationship

Anyone over a certain age will remember the agony and panic of trying to send an SMS message in the early 2000s. With pay-as-you-go contracts reigning supreme, and the consequential, ever-present fear of spilling over onto page 3/12 whilst texting on your Nokia 3310, phone users of this golden time had to resort to creative means to use as few characters as possible. As shocking as it may be to millennials, at one time in the not-so-distant past, people had to scribe such abominations as ‘c u l8r’, ‘thx’ and ‘whr r u?’ in order to communicate with their fellow [...]