Ten years from now

What did the zero say to the eight?

“Nice belt.”

NO! STOP LAUGHING! I want to tell you something really alarming.

Ten years from now, when we’re all 25 or 26, and maybe considering kids (or already parents!) laughter may not even exist anymore! Instead of you sitting there in your seat, laughing at my awful joke, the kids and teenagers of ten years from now will just be saying ‘lol’.

I’m quite serious. Already, people have started to use this internet-founded expression of amusement in real life, along with other expressions such as ‘rofl’.

There’s just something about hearing people laugh that makes us laugh! Lots of the time, we may not even understand something someone has said, but other people laugh, so we laugh. It’s contagious.

Ten years from now, it’s quite likely that laughter won’t even exist! Kids won’t laugh at the jokes their trying-to-be-funny peers tell them. They’ll just say ‘lol’. They won’t roll on the floor laughing! They’ll just say ‘rofl’. It sounds sort of boring, doesn’t it! ‘Lol’ and ‘rofl’ aren’t contagious at all, are they?

But the text-speak revolution doesn’t end with laughter. What about that great expression, ‘ily’?

‘ily’, I-L-Y, stands for I love you. One of the most meaningful things you can say to a person! People wait their whole lives to hear those three words, and they’ve been reduced to a simple acronym that you can say without even meaning it! In the future, when proposing, will guys get down on one knee and say, ‘ily, will you marry me?’ I seriously hope not! That would be an AWFUL proposal!

And can you imagine wedding speeches? “When I first spotted Sarah, I knew that she was the one for me. Sarah, I’m so glad we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together… ILY!”

Yuck. What a way to spoil the moment! How can something so beautiful, so meaningful, possibly retain any meaning at all when it has been turned into nothing more than 3 letters?

And finally, what about that actually STUPID expression, ‘biffle!’ Um, what? Best friends for life? BFFL? Biffle?

Once again, internet-speak has changed something meaningful, telling someone they mean so much to you that you want to be friends with them for your entire life, into something inane and utterly meaningless only said (currently) by tween girls whose only obsessions are One Direction* and boys in general. You even SOUND stupid when you say it. Biffle. That doesn’t sound like a word at all! It sounds like a brand of pillows or tissues or something!

We really need to do something about this! Let’s not let internet shorthand destroy laughter, love and friendship! I want my kids to grow up in a world where they laugh, hear the words ‘I love you’ and have a best friend for life, not a ‘biffle’.

Ten years from now, I hope that we still know how to speak in a way that actually means something. I want to be able to tell a joke and have people laugh, even though they’re probably laughing at me, not at the joke!

*No offence, girls. I'm just joking. DON'T HURT ME.