U2

This two letter combination can act as a noun when referring to the famous rock band. It can act as a noun phrase, when read out loud, as a response to a clerk's greeting at a superstore. It is also a commonly used phrase in other forms of communications in instant messages,text messages, email, letter, student report, etc.

I have seen many forms of communication follow the chat lingo. Some examples include using "u" instead of "you," "2" instead of "too" or "to", "r" instead of "are," "rite" instead of "right," and "k" instead of "okay." I receive many such communications and I have always wondered if the text is still English.

Watch Cingular's text messaging commercial that is attached below this post also. There is a significant difference in the language that sub-titles in English had to be included for all the characters that the daughter utters.

This article illustrates my pet peeve: using chat lingo in emails.

Instead of well-crafted writing that adheres to accepted standards, the critics see e-mail, chat, blogs, and instant messages that lack standard punctuation and capitalized words. Complete sentences are as rare as misspellings are common. To make matters worse, words are seemingly misspelled on purpose: certainly a student who misspells "separate" as "seperate" and "sulfur" as "sulfer" has a very different intent than one who misspells "see you" as "cu" and "hate" as "h8". Acronyms are used with-out definition, and they are used so frequently as to render entire passages as cryptic as a secret code.