--- title: Texting, abbreviations and emoji — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Texting, abbreviations and emoji», a lesson of the language course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Texting is a new kind of writing that behaves a lot like talking: short, fast, and full of codes like "brb", "lol" and little pictures c --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/) / Texting, abbreviations and emoji # Texting, abbreviations and emoji Lesson 30 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 14 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/0/) — Texting is a new kind of writing that behaves a lot like talking: short, fast, and full of codes like "brb", "lol" and little pictures called emoji. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/1/) — Ava sends her gran a 💀 because a video is hilarious ("I'm dead, that's so funny"), and Gran rings in a panic thinking someone has died; the same picture meant two things to two generations. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/2/) — Short forms are much older than phones: "O.M.G." turns up in a letter from 1917, and the sideways smiley :-) was suggested in 1982, before most people had ever seen a mobile. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/3/) — Because texts have no voice or face, capitals, emoji and abbreviations do the job of tone, and different people read them differently, so think about who you're texting. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/4/) — LOL means "laughing out loud"; some older people once thought it meant "lots of love", and today it is often used just to sound friendly. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/5/) — My God!)" was written by a British admiral, Lord Fisher, in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1917, one of the earliest known written uses. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/6/) — Many young people use 💀 to mean "I'm dying of laughter"; older people may read it as being about death. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/7/) — "Emoji" is Japanese: "e" (picture) plus "moji" (character); early emoji appeared on Japanese phones in the late 1990s, including a famous set by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/8/) — Emoticons are faces made from keyboard characters, like :-) and :-( ; the computer scientist Scott Fahlman suggested them in 1982. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/9/) — Surveys reported in the news say some young people read the 👍 emoji as cold or annoyed, while many older people use it just to mean OK. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/10/) — In 2015 the Oxford Dictionaries "Word of the Year" was an emoji, 😂, the face with tears of joy, because it was the most used that year. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/11/) — Writing in all capitals usually feels like shouting in a text, but some older people use capitals because they are easier to read. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/12/) — "brb" means be right back, "gtg" means got to go, and "ttyl" means talk to you later. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/30-texting-abbreviations-and-emoji/13/) — Some studies, including research in Britain, found that children who used text abbreviations were not worse at spelling, and some were better; scientists still argue about it. - ← previous: [Sarcasm and tone of voice](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/29-sarcasm-and-tone-of-voice/) - next →: [How babies learn to talk](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/31-how-babies-learn-to-talk/) - ↑ back to [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/)