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    Can you understand the beginning of this essay? “My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4. we used 2 go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & 3 kds FTF.”
    The Scottish teacher who received it in class had no idea what the girl who wrote it meant.  The essay was written in a form of English used in cell phone text messages. Text messages(also called SMS)through cell phones became very popular in the late 1990s. At first mobile phone companies thought that text messaging would be a good way to send messages to customers, but customers quickly began to use the text messaging service to send messages to each other. Teenagers in particular enjoyed using text messaging, and they began to create a new language for messages called “texting.”    
    A text message is limited to 160 characters, including letters, spaces, and numbers, so messages must be kept short. In addition, typing on the small keypad of a cell phone is difficult, so it's common to make words shorter. In texting, a single letter or number can represent a word, like“r”for“are”, “u”for“you,”and“2”for “to. ”Several letters can also represent a phrase, like “10l”for“laughing out loud.”Another characteristic of texting is the leaving out of letters in a word, like spelling “please” as “pls.”