Quick! What Does KUTGW Mean?
Kate Washburn didn’t know what to make of the email a friend sent to her office with the abbreviation “NSFW” written at the bottom.
Then she clicked through the attached sideshow, titled “Awkward Family Photos.” It included shots of a family in furry “nude” suits and of another family alongside a male walrus in a revealing pose.
After looking up NSFW on NetLingo.com—a Web site that provides definitions of Internet and texting terms—she discovered what it stood for: “Not safe for work.”
As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur.
One reason for the surge in texting abbreviations—more than 2,000 and counting, according to NetLingo—is the boom in social-media sites like Twitter, where messages are limited to 140 characters.
Text messages, too, are limited in length, so users have developed an alphabet soup of shorthand abbreviations to save time, and their thumbs.
Taking time to learn the jargon may seem like a WOMBAT (“Waste of money, brains and time”). But with over one trillion text messages sent and received in the U.S. last year, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group, you run the risk of feeling out of it if you don’t.
Oh yeah, KUTGW? Keep Up The Good Work.
Photo by digi.
Angela Shupe on August 7th, 2009 5:33 am
I must be behind on my netspeak because I still call it NSWF (Not So Work Friendly).
When it comes to abbreviations I guess I stay with the basics: LOL, NSWF, JK. When I get a message filled with too much netspeak I give up trying to read it. :)
Jaclyn Wells on August 11th, 2009 1:29 pm
I agree with Angela, sometimes you get messages where practically the whole thing is encrypted with netspeaking and you can barely understand what they are talking about if you understand them at all. I use the simple ones such as lol, jk, lmao but other then that most of the time i have to ask the person what it means when they use netspeaking terms. I think in our world of fast everything, fast food, fast cars, fast shopping, high speed internet and more…that we are turning into these fast frenzy people including typing, where rather than type out the word we would rather cut out 2.5 seconds by using netspeak instead.
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