Digital Marketing

Social media vocabulary: corruption of language and jargon

Don’t get corrupted by social media jargon

What is social media lingo? Slang is informal words and language that are not associated with the standard / common language that we use in society.

Social media jargon is derived primarily from communication on social media. When communicating on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, you are often presented with a small amount of space to convey information and pass it on to the other user involved.

Shortcuts, abbreviations, and L337 Speak are often made up of short, fast lines of communication.

Early social media slang

Before Twitter and Facebook wall posts and status updates, there were AOLs and chat rooms with instant messaging.

AOL is known for being the great father of creating slang on the Internet and was the pioneer of the trends for quick communication shortcuts. L33t Speak and Acronyms were used a lot in the days of AOL.

L337 Talk AOL users typed words like:

/ / 0 n3 Y = Money

MyCrOsoFt = Microsoft

4 replaces A, 3 replaces E, 7 replaces T, 1 replaces L, and $ replaces S, 13 replaces B are just a few more examples. The L337 language is still widely used in video games.

Acronyms or “text talk” it is still very popular too. Here are some examples

U = You 2 = Too much TTYL = Talk to you later LOL = Laughing out loud 4 = To R = Are O = OH

Corruption of the English language

With chat rooms and instant messaging slowing down traffic loss and more and more users are texting and using social media to communicate, Internet Slang has now morphed into Social Media Slang.

These are the worst nightmares of the English teacher. These jargon shortcuts can corrupt your business and your education.

Just because it’s easy to do just “slang” or “text-speak,” try to keep practicing good communication and not be a victim of social media jargon. You don’t want to write a proposal for a client who has this below:

“Hello, do you want them to do it today? Please let me know, k, ttyl”

Of course, this is highly unprofessional and can be detrimental to your label. Although this sounds like common sense, more and more professionals are getting caught up in “social media jargon.”

As with your personal profiles, keep your online etiquette very professional too and don’t fall for the corruption of shortcuts and jargon.

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