Short-forms ∝ Attitude

Social media, a way to connect people around the world. Those who created this virtual world are the geeks, who didn’t connect themselves to outside world until they get succeed. Now when the world is in their hands, it’s maintenance rely on the most challenging creature on the planet “the human being”. If these websites or applications don’t provide new functionality or updates on daily basis then it is not worth than 2 ₹, use and through pen because of its free service and a challenging environment.

The evolution of human has turned from monkey to man but their behavior is still same as monkeys somewhere. They never get pleased by one thing. Their mind always jumps like their ancestor from one thing to another.

By keeping this thing in mind, that human nature changes very often, the inventors of social media tools, set some special department for mining user’s data. By this, they maintain knowledge of your likes, dislikes and all other activities. For regular involvement of users they keep on merging new options in their tools. They started it with advertisements, promotions, News, job alerts and many more options. It’s not the end here, facebook and twitter both are currently implementing buying and selling options of e-commerce websites on their front page for user’s ease. Now wherever you go, they will follow you.

It was their efforts to provide us a good facility of interaction from everywhere.

We adopt these facilities and it has totally changed our life style. A great change can be seen in our messaging style that now we are habitual of using short forms.

Messages before- good morning, good night, sweet dreams, o my god, take care, goodbye, good luck, I don’t know, what’s up?, I miss u , have a nice day etc.

Messages now- gm, gn, sd, omg, tc, bc , gb, gl, idk, sup, imu, hand.

It’s good to use short forms because it saves your typing efforts and time. But we should use these appropriately. We should take care of the timing that when or where to use it. We are so habitual of these words that sometimes we use it, but it doesn’t suits to the situation and become formalities.

I was on facebook and get to know that one of my friend got placed in a software company. I typed a message on his chat box “congratulation man! paaartyyyy”.

Reply was- “ty”.

Common man! Does it make sense to say only two characters at this time.

Though I got him, I typed my next msg as, wat????????

Reply- thank you bro.

On my birthday my eyes stuck only at one post out of hundreds and that was-

“Hbd”.

I would prefer not to wish than such a vague message.

You can see many messages of these types very often, which looks very informal. Actually these short forms are very tricky. It reflects your attitude to others. A simple example is a thank you message from E-commerce websites. It always comes with appropriate words and a good format so that the customer feels happy. What would happen if they send a thank you message like- “ty 4 shopng” . Obviously either you will get offend or you’ll laugh.

I was in a writing competition in Indore where we had to cross check our written sheets. There were many contestants and most of them were teenagers. I got a story written by Yash Jain, a 17 year boy. The story written by him was quite good but he used many words such as “cz, gr8 plc, 4u, plz, and many more. I didn’t find out any other mistake in his story because the flow of story was very good.

The point here is teenagers are becoming habitual of these words and a little more prone to use it. They always use these words anywhere which is not a good idea.

This one is the best -
msg- ftbomh.
Me – what??
Reply- from the bottom of my heart.
Me- oh I see!

Ok, last and recent one. You can see how people wishes on our national festivals.

me - Happy Republic Day.
reply- HRD


It’s not for all, exceptions are also there. Some people generally uses these omg, tc, wtf, ri8, gn but when it comes about wishing or congratulating someone they never make formalities. A full Good Morning, Congratulations, Many many happy returns of the day, Happy Birth Day, All the best, Thank You and Have a Nice Day, has totally different impact than those informal short forms.

Using these short forms is not always wrong but sometimes it becomes very informal. A sensible person might use it sometimes but would never use it in formal situations, while other who don’t care of anything, can use it in every situation. In point of fact …

"A Smart person always knows, when to use it and when to not!"