The nineteenth century playwright and philosopher George Bernard Shaw wrote many articles about the abuse and deterioration of the English language. His story, 'Pygmalion,' was used as the basis for the Lerner and Lowe musical, 'My Fair Lady,' and Oscar-winning movie, about a Cockney street woman, Eliza, with horrible speech, transformed by Professor Henry Higgins into a society lady with proper pronunciation. Today, we have a similar challenge. It's slowly been infiltrating our lives since the advent of e-mail, and later, text messaging.

Stenographers, still seen in courtrooms, had been using short cuts for years, by breaking common syllables into cryptic characters, which they later translate back into typed words. But beyond that, there is no excuse for what the latest generation is doing to butcher our sacred language. Sure, we're used to simple silly abbreviations like 'U R' on everything from bumper stickers to greeting cards. Substituting numbers for words, as in '4' and '8' is also fairly widespread. But the real difference is the use of letters for whole phrases or sentences. LOL (laughing out loud) and ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing) are two examples. Add an emoticon, the little face made from the punctuation keys, and you've got a whole new language :)

As cute as all that is, I'm afraid that we eventually may lose our words and become a symbol society of coded messages. If we don't know the meaning of the following letters, we may be delegated to the world of the literary dinosaurs:

AFK Away from keyboard....BAK Back at keyboard....BFN Bye for now

BBL Be back later....BRB Be right back....CU See you....CYA See ya

LTNS Long time, no...IFUEE I forgot you even existed

TTFN Ta ta for now....L8TR Later....GAL Get a life

HAND Have a nice day....OT Off topic....PU That stinks

TSWC Tell someone who cares....GFETE Grinning from ear to ear

There are probably so many more letter phrases that are being invented as I type. We've come a long way since my early days when 'Pig Latin,' was all the rage. Like ave-fay, un-fay for 'Have Fun.' Both of these methods of communicating are cute and silly, but what if the next generation is so used to these initial shortcuts, they forget how to write real words or how to spell? Will we be seeing whole books written using 'U' and 'R' for the actual words? Will every book come with a decoding section? Will future dictionaries begin including all these acronyms?

I'm not an alarmist or a wet blanket, but IMHO, (in my humble opinion) I'm just a bit concerned. It's probably time for the EOD. (end of discussion) Is Shaw spinning in his grave? I wonder. :)