Hell the other day I was visiting the boyfriend of a friend's daughter. The guy is at university, he's 19. He's the 2nd or 3rd best student in the entire biology branch that he's in (a very talented student in biology basically). I was over at his place fixing his internet connection (which is a basic thing well under our talent that we programmers always end up doing for friends, just like a surgeon always gets asked for an opinion on a friend's runny nose).
When I got his connection back, he rushed on to eBay to see if there were any new video games to buy. As I was there, and we were chatting, I saw him write a question to an eBayer. He wrote it in short SMS!! Holy hell! So I told him "awww come on, why are you doing that? don't tell me it's about speed, I mean I bet I can type in full proper French with accents much faster than you can type in SMS-style ... so why do you do that?". He then admitted to me that sometimes he even wrote to his biology teachers in that SMS-style language, and that though his teachers disliked it and had told him so, being a good student meant his teachers just went along with it. He said he couldn't help it.
I'm telling you, it's becoming a major problem. A lot of online forums in French are beginning to be populated with SMS-style comments.
I don't know the equivalent in English, but I'm sure the same problem exists everywhere that mobile phones exist. I suppose an approximation would be: "Hw r u? c u 2nite?"
By the way, I don't like mobile phones, have I ever mentiond this before? I hope they manage to prove once and for all that these bloody microwaves cook your brain ("they" meaning: not the industry itself, which only ever "proves" the contrary).
Neither is it particularly new in French surely, I remember a trip to Paris about 10 years ago when it took me ages to finally realise why all the video shops had "K7" The Oxford English Dictionary has an interesting article on the French variations used in SMS messaging.
The "real" spelling of braai is, well, braai. So even that has been SMS-ized.
Fascinating.
I've never heard robot used anywhere else, but I've never been to NZ. Most of the SAfricanisms I know of are pretty limited to SA and maybe Namibia -- like a bakkie would just be a pickup truck in Zim.
My favorite was always the way they use the word now, in that it doesn't actually mean now. If I say, I'll do it now, it means I'll do it later. Just now is still later, but a little sooner than now. And now now means the soonest of all, but still probably not right now as we'd understand it.
