Word Search
At first, grandma didn’t know why my joke was funny. I discovered that her definition of the word tweet was not the same as mine! To her, a tweet was just a sound a bird makes. But I know that a tweet can also be a post on Twitter. Twitter is a website that lets people post messages for other people to read. I began to wonder what other new words or phrases I could teach my grandmother. I went online to find out.
When I searched the online dictionary, I discovered that the new definition for the word tweet was just added to the dictionary this year. Other new words and phrases were added to the dictionary as well. Many of these words and phrases are needed because we use them to talk about technology. You might remember our recent article Bye-Bye Bullies. We wrote about people who bully others by posting hurtful things online. Now there is a word for that. The word is cyberbullying, and it is a new word in the dictionary. Social media is another phrase that is now in the dictionary. Any website that you use to talk to other people could be called social media.
I also learned that LOL was just added to the dictionary! I already knew that LOL means “laugh out loud.” I didn’t know that we use it because of text messages. People use LOL because it doesn’t use as many characters, or letters and spaces. Most text messages can only have 160 characters. So, people started using LOL and other abbreviations to make their text messages shorter.
We use a lot of abbreviations when we text. How many of these do you use?
Technology changes the way we communicate in so many ways. I bet that your grandmother never typed LOL when she was a kid. She probably never used the words email, blog, or smartphone either. And, I bet that when she heard the word “mouse,” she didn’t think of a computer. TTYL!
TLX News Journal: Civics Activity
Think of a new word or phrase. The word or phrase can be the name of an activity or the name of something you use to complete an activity. Using your new word or phrase, write a sentence in your journal. Trade with a friend. Use context clues to define each other’s new word or phrase.
