Chat Hieroglyphics

“<3, Rofl, xD, Lol, :P” the list is endless! But these symbols of chat culture are like an epidemic, it has even infected me! Normally my g Talk window is always open (though I keep my status as “busy”). This is primarily so that my first born can ping and see if any of us are online when she is free and if we are, we talk. As the family rebel is always online she talks with her sister most of the time but sometimes I do get to talk and this is where the fun comes in. The budding adult thinks she knows everything – she decides who is speaking (as we both use my id) by the way we type our response. Unfortunately for her I have been infected by the chat hieroglyphics and have started using this very frequently and when I type in “LOL” or “rofl” she thinks it’s her siblings and she yells at her for fooling her! What fun I do have in such circumstances, in fact I am almost rolling on the floor laughing at this!


When the SMS culture first began I was the last one in the family to start using it! This was mainly because I was too lazy to tap thrice to get the alphabets right! It is very frustrating to want to type “cannot” and end up writing “bammot”!

The girls started growing up and they each got their own cell phones and became really good at this vague art of sms-ing but I continued to avoid using it! Then I decided enough was enough and bought myself a touch phone with a QWERTY letter pad with a stylus et-al! This was one of the first touch phones in the market and thus not as sensitive as the ones nowadays, so there I was again trying to turn the phone horizontal to get the QWERTY pad out and the stylus all ready to type and more often than not it would refuse to behave, like an unruly adolescent and I was stuck with tap tapping thrice to get my message sent!

I still have this phone though the other family members have upgraded themselves to technologically better ones and thus my messaging is still at the pre-primary level!

My lovable teen loves to sms. When she is getting bored at school or if she is alone at home I get a lot of hearts and kisses through these symbols plus long rambling messages just for the heck of it. I normally respond only when there is some kind of question- with a yes or no or go ahead or a wow depending on what is expected. But as you would notice, mine are one word smses, sometimes I have sent a “?” instead of a "why"! Most of the time I do not respond as I believe it does not require an answer and why waste good money when it’s not needed? The hubby is also kind of addicted to it and I treat him in a very similar manner.

I have thus been voted as the coldest and the most unresponsive creature on this side of the world! In fact all of them discuss both in front and behind my back about how I respond to their various messages and of course ROFL

Here I would like to clarify that I love to type on g talk as I have the computer keypad in front of me and I know which key is where! Of course having been infected by the short form virus I have started using them here (hence the confusion of my elder one). But I am still a novice at creating the various smileys’ using the different characters. I still do not understand why they are called smiley when they are sometimes sad! Oh I forgot they are now known as emoticons!

Maybe it’s time to get myself a new phone with a physical QWERTY keypad so that I can send long useless notes to all of them. Maybe I will send copies to them so that they realize that I am not wanting in my sms savviness! Maybe I will scour the net for the latest short forms in messaging and forget all my grammatically correct English. Maybe it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie......