Chatspeak deprecated

Look, I'm really sorry. I know it's snobby and literate-ist of me, but I just can't help it.

When you say "4" instead of "for", or "u" instead of "you", my estimate of your intelligence and possible interestingness takes a huge dive.

People, please: this is not cellphone texting. You don't pay by the letter here. It's awkward and I personally happen to find it rude: it suggests that I am not worthy of the extra time it would have taken you to type that second letter. Worse than that, it costs me time: I have to try to figure out what "cld" means in the context of your other abbreviations. And that's bad for you too, because it means that I've stopped listening to what you say while I work out what you said.

Can we just drop this crap and speak normally, please?

I wonder whether "get off my lawn" means anything to people who didn't grow up in the suburbs, where people had houses with private lawns? There was (still is) a great social divide between (typically) younger couples who had kids and therefore were used to children playing on their grass, and (typically) older people who didn't have kids and felt the need to protect their territory against incursion. It seems lawns can be populated either by children or by gnomes, but not both.