OMG......ROFLMAO......NOT.......

Maybe it's the English teacher in me, but I suspect I was this way a long time before I became an English teacher.

I abhor abbreviations. And I love using words like abhor. I especially enjoy using it around teenagers because they have NO idea what it means, and they usually have to look at one another and I know they want to ask each other, "WHAT did she just say?" But I digress.

I can't stand abbreviations. One of the blogs I follow makes me cringe and want to throw up at the same time because her posts are fraught with abbreviations. And I also love using words like fraught.

It's one lol, omg, lmao, roflmao after another.

Come on, really? Can anything really be that funny? And if it is, isn't it worth real words?

Take lol, for example. If something is funny enough to merit an lol, isn't it worthy of a "haha"? It's just one more character. Two if you put a space in there.

I use "ha ha" a lot in my writing. I can add as many "ha's" as necessary to indicate just how funny I think it was supposed to be. Or sometimes I add a bunch of them just to irritate the person to whom I'm writing.

If I find something really funny (or I just want to be extra irritating), I might follow something I've written with something like this:

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

That didn't take much time at all. It accomplishes the same purpose, and no r on the f was required.

I can't even bring myself to abbreviate when I'm texting. I spell the whole word out, even if it's something like antidisestablishmentarianism. Not that the occasion has ever arisen that I needed to type antidisestablishmentarianism in a text message. I guess it helps that I have a Blackberry and every letter actually has its own key.

Another thing that I don't like much but I can't tear myself away from is the ubiquitous smiley face. And I love using words like ubiquitous too, but I'll bet you saw that coming.

I still use smiley faces in my writing occasionally, but I'll bet I erase five of them for every one I let stand. Every time I use a smiley face, I remember reading something in a book by one of those true crime writers. She said that using smiley faces in writing was a common characteristic of women who were incarcerated.

I don't want to get used to it, like it might be bad karma or something.