Why would you want to abbreviate all words?

This desire to shorten all words is not new. This trend has been around since the advent of the mobile phone decades ago. At the time, only a few words were subjected to this treatment, such as “Bonjour (Bjr)”, “Coucou (Cc)” or the famous “Je t’aime (jtm)”.

The first reason for this shortening was economy of characters. An SMS is counted in the number of characters. The fewer you place, the longer your message will be sent. This way, you will be able to spend only 1 text message to say what you have to say instead of 2.

But over the years, when instant messaging on social networks came along, the number of characters no longer became a real problem. From now on, speed is paramount. Shortening your words is one of the quickest ways to respond to your interlocutor and avoid long, boring texts.

But young people have pushed the trend even further. They have almost codified words to the point of making them almost unreadable only by their community of friends. Thus, only the closed circle of the small “clan” has the privilege of understanding what is being said in the texts. How can you imagine the term “GIYF” as “Google is your friend”? This codification is often found in online games where teammates have to chat on the battlefield.