What is a greeting, anyway? I think of "Hi" or "Good Morning!" Greetings are a friendly message from one who is absent or has been absent and is now addressing you. Since greetings are friendly, they are accompanied by a smile and often expect a response.
When it's your friend's birthday, you need to send a birthday greeting, at the very least. "Happy Birthday!" is the most recognized, sincere, quick and easy greeting. You are saying to the birthday person, "I hope you are having a happy birthday at this moment and all through the day." It can be spoken in person or over the phone. It can be written on a birthday card, eCard, eMail message, text message, or SMS.
SMS is an acronym for Short Message Service. SMS is made up of shorthand, abbreviations, and Internet slang. The evolution began in chat rooms when the messages and texts that people were sending were limited to a certain number of characters. Twitter, the micro-blogging site, limits messages today to 144 characters. Many other messaging systems set limits on the actual number of characters.
SMS was created when mobile phones allowed you to send messages by using the letters on the number buttons of the keypads. How cumbersome it is to hit the "2" button 4 times to get to the letter "c." Many people still send text messages using phones that do not have a full QWERTY keyboard available.
Cost is a factor in sending long text messages. Why pay for "I love you" when "i <} u" is half the characters. Before the Internet, there were telegraphs and telex messaging systems that charged by the character. There are still some systems and telephone contracts that charge by the character so the shorter your message the better.
Shorthand is not new. Before there were machines in offices, there was a convention of the secretary taking down everything their boss said in dictation by means of shorthand. This was a "language" created for this purpose and taught in business schools. It involved abbreviations and phonetic symbols that helped the secretary transcribed the dictated letter or text into proper language.
In our hectic life, remembering a friend or relative's birthday in advance with enough days to buy a card or gift and mail it or deliver it, just doesn't happen. It's a shame, as there are some beautiful birthday cards with well written greetings printed inside that go a long way towards expressing our feelings for others. If you find that you can't get a birthday message sent in advance, rely on the digital technology to send ecards, emails, text message and SMS.
A message is a communication with some information. A text is the actual words of anything written. It can be long or short. SMS is the SHORT message service incorporating abbreviations, substitutions, and slang.
Some find it fun to create their own SMS using these basic rules:
1. Drop the vowels
2. Use numbers for words. Example "ate" becomes "8", "for" becomes "4"
3. Change words to single letters. Example "are" becomes "r", "you" becomes "u"
4. Slang: LOL = laughing out loud or lots of love depending on the context
Have fun creating SMS, but remember that while it is shorter and quicker to type your cryptic message and may save you some money, it is harder for the recipient to read than their natural language.
