Better Understanding The Lingo

There are a lot of things that adults (and some times teens / young adults) see on the Internet and have no idea what it refers to or what it is short hand for. This week I will give you resources to better understand Internet slang, text messaging lingo, and Internet culture in general.

* WARNING: There are aspects of these items that are adult / mature in nature. There may be in cases discussion of sexuality or other topics that are of an extremely provocative *

Emojipedia gives the history, background information, and definition about an emoji. It explains how the emoji means different things on different social media platforms. It also shows how the emoji is displayed on different platforms.

Emoji Dictionary seems to be more crowd sourced (users can add their interpretation or definition). This website illuminates what an emoji can be slang or inside talk about a subject.

Netlingo has several categories to explain terminology from business, marketing, IT, and the Internet. This page deals with a long list of acronyms that are used online or in text messaging.

Know Your Meme take those pictures that you see with text and discusses their origin, background, when they became popular, what it can be shorthand. It's really fascinating.

Giphy provides a tremendous amount of giphs (looping videos that are usually 2 - 4 seconds). It doesn't really give any explanation or information but can be a resource to find gifs you might use on social media. The website also helps users create their own giph. There is a Giphy keyboard for people that love giphs that can be installed on iPhones. 

Imgur is home to many of the viral pictures and short videos that make their way to social media. A very entertaining site with a devoted community of users that comment and submit images. 

Reddit is an online community that often makes it into the technology news for the bad behavior of its users and the difficult role of the site's owners. The site tries to be a place where people can discuss and share all kinds of things but sometimes this means users push the limits of what is acceptable. The front page of Reddit is usually entertaining and contains stories, images, memes, that become popular later on Facebook and Twitter. There are groups to discuss and learn about a wide array of topics. One of the ones a lot of my friends enjoy is "Explain Like I'm Five"  which simplifies a concept to very basic terms.

Urban Dictionary has lots of terms that teens and adults use as slang, lingo, short hand, etc. There are a lot of mature and adult items on the website. The link that I provided is there guide to acroymns.

I thought this Time magazine article might be helpful, "116 Teen Text Terms Decoded for Confused Parents"