LOVE it or hate it, there is no escape from Internet slang.
This is especially true among young people in some English-speaking countries such as Australia, the UK, and the US. These days, if they haven't caught up with the latest popular Internet slang, chances are that they often feel out of the loop on social media.
Take these posts by The Washington Post for example: "David Bowie dying is totes tradge" and "When Cookie hugged Jamal, it made me totes emosh". What on earth do these mean? Well, "totes" is a short form of the adverb "totally". Likewise, "tradge" means "tragic" and "emosh" means "emotional".
It seems that for millennials (those born between the early 1980s and late 1990s), typing in this abbreviated form is not only time-saving but also hip. Many millennial slang words are formed by what linguists call the practice of totesing — the systematic abbreviation of words, according to a recent article in The Washington Post.
Some people think that millennial slang affects the English language negatively. However, Melbourne University linguist Rosey Billington doesn't agree.
"When you are able to use language in a creative way, you show you are linguistically knowledgeable because you know the language rules well enough to use words in a different way," Billington told News.com.au. Her view is backed up by two linguists, Lauren Spradlin, and Taylor Jones, from the City University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania respectively. The two believe that totes-speak is a highly-organized system that can only be used by speakers who have mastered English pronunciation.
"The ability to break apart syllables and mix different sounds together is key. Totesing is about sounds, and it follows the sometimes-complicated sound system of English," Jones told The Washington Post. Totesing is not random. On the contrary, it has strict rules to follow. You need to be very fluent in the English language to be able to understand totes-speak.
