QSL?

I had to laugh and for several reasons when I read the CNN article about High School Students using their Instant messaging babble in school assignments. You'd think that the idea of condensed writing was new, but all that's really new is its use by untrained teens using phone connections. "Techno-spellings" as CNN erroneously calls the practice -- contractions such as B4 for before or u for you , do serve a purpose since typing a message on a silly little keyboard is tedious and slow, but there's nothing technological about knowing how to use a telephone and nothing "techno" about shorthand.

The practice of using standard abbreviations and codes, unbeknownst to the journalism majors at CNN and most adolescents, was in widespread use amongst telegraphers over 150 years ago and for all I know, semaphore users long before that. In fact the protocols were so extreme in the interest of keeping throughput high, that a layman simply wouldn't understand what was actually sent over the wires or later over the air even if they did know the morse code. Certain numbers or letters would stand for phrases and some of these, like 88 for "love and kisses," or QRN for electrical noise of natural origin, or QSL? for "can you hear me now?" still survive in Amateur radio.

What's new is the idea that the practice of wireless digital text messaging is new - it's older than I am. What's new is miniaturization and commercialization and a system designed so that people with no technical knowledge can work it. Nonetheless, jargon has always been with us and always will be and as long as it irritates English teachers, I'm all for it.

A good CW or Morse code operator ( here I co with the real techno-talk) can far outstrip the speed of a good text messager and it was demonstrated on the Tonight Show a while back. Although code is no longer a requirement for an Amateur license, many hams who still use it can send all day at 30 words per minute and some are much faster, but even those using voice communications or digital text use a jargon far more opaque and far less likely to be used with your cell phone or to accidentally find its way into that Sophomore "what I did last Summer" essay or book report.

Here's a snippet from a typical text conversation you might read using one of the many digital modes, like PSK31 that hams have been using for years: K9*** DE N4** QSL tnx fer return. yr RST559 QSB/QRM. My QTH FL FL grid EL97wb. FB QSO om 73 and hope to wk u agn on PSK. N4**. K

Not very new. Not very suitable for communications between mall rats and certainly not for an essay on Moby Dick, but fast, free and capable of spanning the globe instantly. If you can annoy your teachers with it, so much the better.