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Ever watched over the shoulder of your child when they are chatting on MSN or seen one of their text messages on a cell phone?  Often you’ll see just letters and symbols not seeming to make any sense.  Even now in business communications, these abbreviations and symbols are creeping into regular correspondence.  This whole new language of acronyms and emoticons is developing to save keystrokes and share your emotions over these electronic text based communications. 

An emoticon may also be referred to as a smiley, and is a sequence of ordinary printable characters, such as ":-)" or ";-), or a small image, intended to represent a human facial expression and convey an emotion.  Smileys are typically graphic representations such as J or .

There are also 100’s of acronyms that are commonly used in chat sessions.  I’ve pulled out several that you can easily start using to impress you kids.  Try them some time ;-))

AFAIK                          AS FAR AS I KNOW
B4N                             BYE FOR NOW
BRB                            BE RIGHT BACK
BTA                             BUT THEN AGIAN
BTDT                          BEEN THERE, DONE THAT
BTW                            BY THE WAY
C                                 SEE
COZ                            BECAUSE
CUL                            SEE YOU LATER
EZ                               EASY
F2T                             FREE TO TALK
FWIW                          FOR WHAT ITS WORTH
GAL                             GET A LIFE
GTG                            GOT TO GO
GIWIST                       GEE, I WISH I SAI THAT
GMTA                          GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE
HAND                         HAVE A NICE DAY
IAC                              IN ANY CASE
IC                                I SEE
IME                             IN MY EXPERIENCE
IMO                             IN MY OPINION
IMHO                          IN MY HUMBLE OPINION
IOW                             IN OTHER WORDS
IRL                              IN REAL LIFE
JIC                              JUST IN CASE
LOL                             LAUGHING OUT LOUD
NP                               NO PROBLEM
OTOH                         ON THE OTHER HAND
R                                 ARE
TAFN                          THATS ALL FOR NOW
TNTL                          TRYING NOT TO LAUGH
WRT                           WITH REGARD TO

Tilting you head to the side you can see a face with emotion.
:-)                     Smile or happy
:-))                   Very happy
;-)                     Wink
:-D                   Laugh Loud
:-(                     Sad
:'-)                    Tears of Joy
:-X or ;-*          Kiss
>:-(                  Very Angry

Try typing some of these characters into your word processor such as word, you’ll find that these strings are automatically converted to graphic images, for example :-) converts to J and :-( converts to L.