Grammar Girl here. I'm Injohn Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about text messaging abbreviations and how to write a good thank you note.

Before we start, I have a quick pronunciation correction. I fell victim to the same phenomenon I was telling

you about in the Epitome podcast recently. I had only ever read the name of the fancy private

library in New York that I love. I'd never heard it pronounced out loud. It's the grolier club,

the grollier club. Thanks to Peter Atkinson for letting me know.

This first segment is by David Fang from Stanford, and it really jumped out at me after last

week's episode about simplified spelling. My brother's text messages can read like fragments of an

ancient code, H-R-U, W-Y-D, PLZ, truncated, cryptic, and never quite satisfying

to receive. But I'll often find myself second-guessing whether GR-8 means actual excitement or whether

it's a perfunctory nod. This oddity has nagged me for years, so I eventually embarked

upon a series of studies with fellow researchers Sam Maglio and Yeran Zhang. I wanted to know

whether these clipped missives might undermine genuine dialogue, exploring the unspoken signals

behind digital shorthand. As we gathered data,

surveyed people, and set up experiments, it became clear that those tiny shortcuts

sometimes hailed as a hallmark of efficient communication undermine relationships instead of

simplifying them. Most people type TY and BRB for a thank you and be right back

without batting an eye. In a survey we conducted of 150 American texters aged 18 to 65, 90.1% reported

regularly using abbreviations in their daily messages, and 84.2% believed these

shortcuts had either a positive effect or no meaningful impact on how the messages were perceived

by the recipients. But our findings suggest that the mere inclusion of abbreviations, although seemingly benign, start

feeling like a brush off. In other words, whenever a textor chops words down to their bare consonants,

recipients sense a lack of effort, which causes them to disengage. It's a subtle but pervasive

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