Acceptable shorthand Twitter chatter

One of the faux paus of Twitter is abbreviating things just to fit your whole message. Abbreviating things just to get more words in is weak, if not outright dumb. Abbreviating words or using acronyms properly ((The definition of proper also varies by medium, so what is proper in Twitter, may not be proper in a term paper for example. We’re talking about Twitter here.)) is actually good so I think there’s actually a middle ground.

Ten years ago, if you wrote at the end of your email “LOL” most people would give you this look o_O as if wondering, WTF? Right, and then you’d be like OMG! you don’t know what LOL is? now I’m ROFL, BRB. Now a days everyone knows the big ones, like: LOL, OMG, WTF.

I used to hate short-hand “Internet” writings, those pseudo-abbreviations like “cuz” and “smthng” and even some of the ones I mentioned above. Then I realized that sometimes, they’re okay. Its okay to use abbreviations or acronyms, so long as they’re used in the proper context. In fact abbreviations have only been born out of necessity; they’re needed. We need (in Twitter) to convey a complete thought in 140 characters and to do so, we must type in our tweet as succinctly as possible. Sounds easy, but it is not. There are times where we simply can’t take one letter or word out without loosing meaning and we’re on revision 3 or 4.

Just like my hash-tags, here are the acronyms I use to say something that’s unambiguous. These are easily understood and I find them acceptable.

1. AFAIK – As far as I know.
2. IDC – I don’t care.
3. IDK – I don’t know.
4. IMHO – In my honest (or humble) opinion.
5. RL – In real life, as opposed to a virtual environment.
6. LMK – Let me know.
7. LOL – Laughing out loud. Sadly, overused and undervalued.
8. OMG – Oh my god.
9. ROFL – Rolling on the floor laughing. Like LOL but on steroids.j
10. RT – Retweet, a form of quoting someone else when they say something in Twitter.
11. TTYL – Talk to you later.
12. TTYS – Talk to you soon.
13. TY – Thank you.
14. TYSM – Thank you so much.
15. WTF – What the f*ck.
16. WTH – What the hell.
17. YMMV – Your mileage may vary. Meaning, this works for me but you may have a different outcome.

Besides these, what other acronyms do you find acceptable in your social media circles? Surely, each demographic has their own more specialized examples that affect their industry or workspace. Shout out in the comments if you’d like.

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