When typing becomes talking, results can be totes hilar

Ya know, convo once had legit vocab. *

(*You know, conversation once had legitimate vocabulary.)

Forget Esperanto. The digital age has spawned a universal language measured in brevity and propagated globally. Def. (Definitely.)

When the latest headline about the leader of the free world (that would be Obama) outs him for taking a “selfie” at a state funeral, you know the speaking world has gone, well, cray.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m conversant with shorthand and techno-speak. As a journalist, I long ago perfected the art of rapid note-taking, my pages peppered with abbreviations (bldg, wkshp, conf, lger) that only I could translate.

My late father, who would have turned 86 on New Year’s Eve but was far ahead of his time, had a penchant for speaking in acronyms. A favorite and frequent exhortation: QYB! (Quit Your Bitching!)

When my kids hit their teens, I thought they had mastered the art of lingual insouciance, given their ability to invoke disdain with a single word: “Whatever.”

Now I get terse text messages equally cloaked in attitude. Whatev. Obvi. Chillax.

Movies re-imagined with cyberspeak, from ‘Totes Ridictionary’

No one is safe these days from this squeeze play on the English language. In the final play of Sunday’s Saints/Eagles game, I found myself texting my daughter: OMG OMG OMG.

Still, for someone born pre-World Wide Web (remembs?), the Twitter/texting lexicon, with its propensity for shortcuts and initials, offers plenty of pitfalls.

Redonk? Rando? ROFL? Really?

Apparently knowing this, Santa stuffed my stocking with Balthazar Cohen’s Totes Ridictionary, a tongue-in-cheek glossary and guide to the new rule of English 101: If you write it, abbreviate it.

As the author points out, with the advent of texting and Twitter, brevity has become the name of the game: “The dictionary went under technology’s knife and experienced dramatic weight loss – getting the bikini body it had always craved, but at what cost?”

You have to love a book with an introduction titled, “The Internet: Where Language Goes to Die.”

Equally magnif: One chapter that re-imagines movies and pop art with totes ridic dialogue, and another that envisions what might be said by history and literature’s most famous couples … on Twitter.

I fought the language-butchering trend early on. In the stone age of Internet, around the late ’90s, I reviewed a flashy new children’s website for the Times-Picayune newspaper, and lambasted the authors for cutesy spellings like kool and krazy. Why, I asked, would you intentionally misspell words on a site that, at least at some level, was about education? The authors protested. They were simply being hip, they said.

Duh.

If dogs could tweet, from ‘Totes Ridictionary’

But I am losing the war here. I long ago jettisoned any hope that contemporary language will remain intact. So, in efforts to keep up with what’s totes imports in online convo, I offer a few amazeballs words from the Ridictionary glossary, along with verbal color analyst Cohen’s take on them.

• Blates: blatantly. Writes Cohen, “Search for blates on Twitter and your eyes will be assaulted by a churning cesspool of barely comprehensible bilge, one that squarely aims a shotgun at the head of Written English and, at point-blank range, sprays its brains all over the wall.”
• Ledge: legend. “No, not something you stand on while contemplating suicide. To show respect, offer praise or express admiration, choose ledge – the drunker, ballsier, manlier alternative to legend.”
• Nause: to nauseate or annoy. “If you tweet pointless, witless dross about the minutiae of your life approximately once every three seconds, at least some of your followers will consider you a nause – someone so irritating that they turn people’s stomachs.”
• Perf: perfect, perfectly. “Like perfect, but with fewer letters and less hope, perf is notably popular with individuals who’ve turned the quiet annihilation of other people’s self-esteem into an art form.”
• Ridic: ridculous. “On the morally bereft streets of Twitter, ridic is one of the biggest, baddest muthafuckas out there, second-in-command only to totes, who seized power in a bloody coup at the turn of the twecade (Twitter decade).”

Even with Cohen’s guidebook, I’m not certain that I have mastered this new lexicon of twerks, deets and awks. If language is ultimately about communication, I sometimes fear that I am lost in cyberspace, doomed to wander forev in a weird and meaningless forest of skeletal words that leave me bewildered.

Whatev. I will totes survive.