I remember when e-mail was the coolest thing going. Now e-mail is for us old guys, as the millennial generation has stepped things up to communicating with each other via text-messaging.
You’ve seen them – young men and women pounding away at their tiny cell phones with their thumbs, sending each other important messages like RUOK (“Are you OK?”) and IBCNU (“I’ll be seeing you”) in an obscure code known only to people under the age of 25.
In case you aren’t familiar with this peculiar digital dialect, here are some popular phrases and their texted translation:
AYT “Are you there?”
BB4N “Bye bye for now”
404 “Clueless”
DKDC “Don’t know, don’t care”
fwiw “For what it’s worth”
IMHO “In my humble opinion”
imya “I miss you already”
LY “Love ya”
MMD “Make my day”
paw “Parents are watching”
<s> “Smile”
TTYL “Talk to you later”
WTG “Way to go!”
YYSSW “Yeah yeah sure sure whatever”
There are scores of these little code messages that form a secret language among the younger set. And your kids said they had a hard time with foreign languages!
Because preachers have, for centuries, gone to great lengths to translate the gospel into new languages, it seems only right that we find ways to text-message our sermons. I hereby propose a set of text shorthand to assist us with those common phrases often heard in our pulpits:
gud AM, n welcom 2 chrch
(“Good morning, and welcome to church”)
opN yr bble 2 d Gspel of LUK
(“Open your Bible to the Gospel of Luke”)
I hurd a funE tale bout
(“I heard a funny story about . . .”)
n finly
(“And finally…)
nw lts taK ^ d $
(“Now let’s take up the offering”)
And perhaps there are a few phrases you’ve thought on Sunday morning but don’t typically say out loud. Here are some messages you can text to your preacher friends while the choir is singing that last anthem:
whrd we gt dis muzc ldr?
(“Where did we get this music leader?”)