Hurricanes are 1337 (Or Leet… short for elite) and pwns.
Thus
1337 Katrina PWNs NO!!!
Sorry… too much gaming and need for very fast concise short messages.
On the side, I use ASL (American Sign Language) and you wont believe what we do to complete sentances written in regular english. We butcher em.
The way college-age kids talk these days does not surprise me. And I will agree that there is a general dumbing down of people in our society. I graduated from high school in 1974 and there were kids in my graduating class who could not read beyond a 3rd grade level. Geography is no longer being taught in our schools to the extent that it was taught when I was in grade school and middle school. It saddens me that we have people in the south and out on the east coast who would not be able to tell you where Denver, Colorado is, or where the Black Hills of South Dakota can be found. I once had a police officer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana ask me if my home state, South Dakota was located somewhere in Africa!! 
Its just a slang that we use in this day and age, it is our text version of eubonics, and actually I have seen everyone on this forum use it at one time or another. a few examples are LOL, LMAO, ROFL, ect. I guess it is true as said before it probably stems from the fast pace of online gaming and the need to communicate fst with other players,
In defense of kids (my wife is a teacher…)
Back in the good old days (1973, when I graduated from HS) a child could come to first grade and be taught how to read. Nowadays, they teach reading and counting in pre school. Are kids dumber? No.
Same good old days… I learned how to type in 7th grade. (This bit of inspired genius on the part of my parents was a last shot at getting someone to be able to read what I wrote… because I flunked Palmer Penmanship for two years running!) My kid learned how to type at the tender age of eight on a computer.
Geography point: In 1980, whilst merrily blowing your tax dollars earning a geography degree, I spent a grim semester drawing maps. If you think it’s easy, try freehanding a scaled map of the coast of Maine… tracing NOT allowed. In 1992, my eight year old called up the same map on the Net… and proceeded to use data manipulation to enhance the coast of Maine.
In 1974 I joined the US Army. This was right after Vietnam, and the Army was widely reported as taking anyone who could walk and breathe at the same time. (The walk and chew gum test was a career ender for a lot of volunteers.) In 1988 I commanded a company of recruiters in Arizona. The standard for enlistment was a High School Diploma and passing the physical. Those kids weren’t dumb… and they were making probably their first adult decision in their lives.
I don’t doubt for an instant that stupid people exist. (I collect a lot of them for a living.) And the argument that Americans, or people in general, are becoming stupider has been going on for years. In 1968, my father worried about my choosing Spanish as a foreign language… he wondered why Latin wasn’t offered at the High School level.
And for really stupid people, all I have to do is turn on CNN, watch people on the Gulf Coast with water lapping up around their homes… saying dumb things like, “All I want is my electricity back.”
Erik
Argh!!! The pain! The agony! They don’t know where Denver is??? I could understand not knowing where Djibouti, Andorra or Kazakhstan is (well…maybe), but Denver? I’m assuming we’re talking about American kids, right? Of course, I recently heard on the radio that 1 in 4 American kids thinks the Great Lakes are a feature on the face of the moon.
But still…Denver? What’d we do to deserve the pain of non-recognition?
Chris
Denver, CO
Well said Erik. I agree with you - it’s all too easy to focus on the extremes and forget that that is exactly what they are. The far more interesting question is what is typical and my experience with typical mirrors your own. I’ve volunteered some of my time for free tutoring at my local schools (mathematics). While the occasional Joe and Josephine Tentpeg do show up, more often that not what I’m confronted with is a student who is confused, knows that he or she is confused, and has taken the initiative to try to do something about it.
The lament about the lack of quality of the current generation has a long history. I seem to recall it was Socrates who said “The current generation of youth is going to the dogs.”
Denver??? Never heard of the place. I thought Denver was the last name of a country singer.[:D][}:)]
Oh yea, now I remember. Denver is where the mountains stop and the flat states begin.
I think I can come up with an alternate theory regarding why they were using text rather than voice comms - in a crisis like that the phone network often becomes overloaded (it happened during the London bombings - the phone companies took the sensible precaution of reserving a chunk of bandwidth for essential users such as fire, police, ambulance, etc). Texting uses less bandwidth and can often get through where a phone call would fail (you can also often send texts despite there being too little signal strength to call someone).
I agree about the dumbing though - we see the same problem here. Anything remotely technical (or that you need some knowledge to understand) is seen as being too much like hard work and less important than whatever micromind “celebrity” was seen falling out of a club drunk at 2am. With this sort of attitude in the media, is it any wonder people seem ever more clueless?
Denver? Spent a month there during a one-week training course. (No flames, guys, just gently pulling your leg). That’s the problem, I do know where it is - wish I didn’t. My organization has a training facility there (Aurora, actually) and for two or three years went so often I got sick of it.
Well, I’m out of high school and in college now. I graduated high school last year with a 3.5 gpa. While I was in high school I was a member of Youth -in -Government, Administrative Asst, Middle States Committie, Interact Club, SADD,and FBLA. I was the Asst Captain on the ice hockey team. I received two awards and 200 bucks from my school district. I am also a member of the Springfield Twh School District Alumni Association. I am currently in my second year of college and I have a GPA of 3.9. I’ve been on the dean’s list for four semesters in a row. AND, when I am over the computer or textin’ peps I will use short cuts and slang stuffs.
These statistics are worthless without the questions. He, like everyone in the world, had an agenda to prove. Its quite easy to construct a question that could generate the desired result. You could quite conceivably come up with a question that you could get me, with an astronomy minor, to say something that when dumbed down for a newspaper article becomes “the sun goes round the earth!”
“Astronomically, does the sun rise in the eastern sky and set in the western sky?” Seems pretty straightforward doesn’t it? Except “rise” and “set” are being used to imply motion of the sun rather than the rotation of the Earth. Suddenly people that didn’t think it through the whole way (with the qualifier of “astronomically”) are saying the sun goes around the Earth. And what were the possible answers to the question (let alone the question itself and the all important sample size)? Its very easy to conceive that such a survey was composed entire of “so when did you stop beating your wife?” type questions.
Plus there’s always smarmy types like me. I’d have said that the sun goes round the Earth, relative to an observer on the Earth.
And there’s just so much to know these days. And a lot of it is simply not useful to anyone that’s not a specialist. I’m sure 100% of you are getting through your day just fine without knowing what percentage of static on your TV is cosmic background radiation. Or what the ratio of muons to magnetic monopoles in the universe is. Or what a Kerr singularity is. Or if a quark is charmed. Or what the spin of an