20 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
20 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
hakspek
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/hakspeek/ , n. A shorthand method of spelling found on many British
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academic bulletin boards and talker system s. Syllables and whole words in a
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sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the names of which are
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phonetically similar or equivalent, while multiple letters are usually
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dropped. Hence, for becomes 4 ; two , too , and to become 2 ; ck becomes k.
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Before I see you tomorrow becomes b4 i c u 2moro. First appeared in London
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about 1986, and was probably caused by the slowness of available talker
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systems, which operated on archaic machines with outdated operating systems
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and no standard methods of communication. Hakspek almost disappeared after
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the great bandwidth explosion of the early 1990s, as fast Internet links
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wiped out the old-style talker systems. However, it has enjoyed a revival in
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another medium the Short Message Service (SMS) associated with GSM
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cellphones. SMS sends are limited to a maximum of 160 characters, and typing
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on a cellphone keypad is difficult and slow anyway. There are now even
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published paper dictionaries for SMS users to help them do
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hakspek-to-English and vice-versa. See also talk mode.
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