Chat Lingo: Popular IM Abbreviations and Chat Acronyms

If there is one thing that made the Internet a household need, it was the basic freedom of communication that it offered. Come to think of it, the internet is a free communication premise, or at least a real economic one, for so many people all over the world who have a couple of thousand miles between them. Those parents in India with their children in Russia, that wife in Pakistan and her husband in Japan, that girlfriend in Australia with a fiancé in Japan, the Internet has connected all of them, all the time, for a nominal, negligible fee.

The first communication option that the Internet offered was e-mail. It was of course, quickly lapped up by all and sundry, and was soon an extension of the traditional ways of communication. However, in a few years, e-mails became redundant on the personal level, with incidents of lazy people not checking their e-mails for months together and finding out that breakup with their girlfriend or boyfriend that happened six months ago, on their anniversary.

Of course, with the quantum leaps of technology almost every nanosecond, internet communication graduated into Instant Messaging, or IM, that cute little thing that still irritates bosses, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and pleases employees, wives, husbands, sons and daughters and fathers and mothers (there is some abstract meaning in the above sentence, we will have to meditate to know it).

With instant messaging being an instant classic, people soon understood that putting their fingertips where their words were was tiresome, and this gave birth to a new language – the chat lingo. Of course, Shakespeare will not turn, he will very well spin in his grave if he if catches a whiff of this chat lingo, but chat lingo is here, very much here, to stay.

Chat Lingo Popularity

With internet gurus still wondering if web 2.0 will actually work, it is still a question about how these abbreviations came into being and became a global phenomena that they have become today. To understand the popularity of chat lingo, we would first have to think about the reason that chat lingo exists.

Tired Typers:

You have been typing your heart out at the office for like nine hours, and your boyfriend comes online wanting to talk about that roadshow he’s watching next week. How much ever you like him, you just cannot type complete words and sentences. That is when a chat lingo comes handy.

The ‘We Made It, We Have It’ Attitude

The Internet has largely been an experimental ground for geeks and other mere mortals to experiment how to make their virtual life better. Therefore, many such user created concepts are all over the Internet. However, not many have been successful. So, the chat lingo is something that is truly democratic, its made by the people, for the people and of course, of the people.

Here is a short list of the various chat acronyms we have seen in recent times. These IM abbreviations are said to be the best simply because they are easy to understand even to a first time chatter, and of course, save a lot of time for the typist:
BBIAW

Abbreviation	Meaning
BRB	Be Right Back
BOL	Best of Luck
LOL	Laugh Out Loud
Be Back In A While
BBL	Be Back Later
ROTFL	Rolling On The Floor Laughing
ROTFLMAO	Rolling On The Floor Laughing My A$$ Off
LMAO	Laughing My A$$ Off
AWOL	(Used mostly in lifestyle chats, also a real life military term)Away Without Official Leave
AFK	Away from Keyboard
ASL	Age/Sex/Location (muh ultimate favo)
GF	Girlfriend

There are millions and zillions of other IM abbreviations, but these are something that can be termed as global IM abbreviations. These are by no means a complete list too.

Chat lingo abbreviations are the heralders of the uberfamous emoticons we use now. In fact, the only feature some instant messaging software miss out is creating emoticons out of chat lingo. Maybe, with time, we will see that too.