Feeling like a dinosaur

One of Rachel's Facebook status updates just got me thinking. To quote her post, "perhaps this reveals my age, but will someone please explain to me why you youngins add extrrrrrra lletters to alllll of yooooour postsssss? I probably just totally did it wrong didn't I?" I have NO idea Rachel.

In 10 years, will I understand anything Jacob/Maddie writes? Will it make sense to me? If it doesn't make sense, will I, at the very least, KNOW what they are saying? Meaning, will they still be reading and writing English?

I got to googling. "teen facebook language", "teenage acronyms", "teen dictionary".

Seriously. This is what I do in my free time?

I found a site called teenchatdecoder.com. I am NOT kidding. You can type in an acronym and they will spit out its meaning. The fact that there seems to be enough demand for an entire website dedicated to "teen speak" is baffling to me. Is this what I have to look forward to? Translating my kids' vernacular via a website called "teenchatdecoder"??

I am totally freaked out. Back in the day (I say this as if I'm 100 years old), we used to trade "spirals". A "spiral" was literally a spiral notebook that you shared with a friend and you would write notes back and forth to each other in it. When you finished your note (usually about who you had a crush on and if he acknowledged you in the hall), you'd pass the "spiral" back to your friend. I kept quite a few of those spirals. We would decorate the front of them with cut outs from magazines. I distinctly remember me and Sherry's spiral was decorated with words like "tampon" and "PMS" and the thing was laminated for pete's sake. We thought that was innovative.

It's amazing how far we've come in 20 years. Technology, while I embrace it, horrifies me when it comes to my kids. When they are teenagers, I can only just hope and pray that we are both still speaking the same language...