We are living in a cyber society.

Today people are working with cybergraphics, presenting them to clients via cyberspace, and then unwinding by having hot and steamy cybersex. Professionally, e-mails and instant messages have replaced letters and phone calls. Personally, AOL Panties Chat 63 has forever replaced curling up with a good book.

The Internet explosion has spawned everything from humorous uses of punctuation, to interesting rules regarding appropriate cyber-conduct when writing, to the largest destroyers of proper verbiage ever. These three nuances can be easily lumped into the following categories:

    1. Smileys

    2. Netiquette

    3. Cyber-Shorthand

Everyone loves smileys.

A smiley, by definition, is one of those quirky little facial glyphs used to express delight or to indicate humor or irony. In other words, a punctuation orgy. Since their birth sometime in the mid-90's, these furry little creatures have casually made their way into e-mails and instant messages and Panties Chat 63. ;-)

Netiquette, a distant relative of Emily Post, was the first guy to compose a list of online-manners. He also had a starring role in "Dude, Where's My Car?" Netiquette tells us to never send an e-mail in anger, and that if we type in all caps IT SEEMS LIKE WE'RE SHOUTING.

Smileys and Netiquette go together like Mary-Kate and Ashley.

Cyber-shorthand is like Bob Saget.

While both Smileys and Netiquette are helpful tools when it comes to clarification and online expression, cyber-shorthand does nothing but f--k stuff up.

Cyber-shorthand is a satanic disease that affects over two million Americans. Once infected with cyber-shorthand, victims compulsively abbreviate the smallest of phrases, and change words of one and two syllables into some kind of alphanumeric code.

These people actually believe either that it is more efficient or makes more sense to say 'btw' when they mean 'by the way' or to type 'brb' rather than spell out 'be right back'.

These are the same geniuses that turn 'before' into 'b4' and 'later' into 'l8r'.

Obviously, the rest of us have a hard time translating.

While one supposes that most people can agree on the significance of 'lol' even if they don't use it themselves, most other shorthand is not so self-explanatory. 'Brb' could easily be mistaken for some kind of burp, while 'b4' could mean that the cyber-shorthand sufferer either wants to play a game of battleship, chess, or bingo.

Perhaps the largest reason cyber-shorthand seems so lucrative has to do with its very elementary process of abbreviation. Take 'Britney's Tits', for example. This is a very time saving acronym. The problem is that although condensing the desired expression was not very difficult, correctly translating it requires a monstrous decoder ring. Still, upon careful expansion, one invariably arrives at: Bringing Real Insights To Nevada Every Year, Stopping To Inspect Tourists' Sisters.

Clearly the problem lies not with encoding but with decoding.

One can only imagine the myriad of options when faced with deciphering 'btw':

Beer Then Wine?

Between Two Women?

Braving The Wombat?

Perhaps the most disturbing point regarding cyber-shorthand is that it is slowly migrating from its occasional use in cyber-space to full-fledged use in the real world. Consider the New York State Thruway's electronic toll system, EZPass.

This service could have just as easily been named Easy Pass, but one supposes EZPass is somehow more concise and therefore easier to read when traveling at the high speeds of up to ten miles per hour right before the toll booths.

One can only lament for that person who doesn't have EZPass but who still accidentally goes through the EZPass lane while trying to find quarters and switch a Beethoven CD.

Perhaps if the sign had said EASY PASS in actual English, instead of cyber-shorthand, that person might have realized that he was in the wrong lane, switched lanes, and wouldn't still owe the state of New York 30 cents for his seven mile journey from exit B3 to exit B2.

Perhaps that person will begin his complaint to the New York State Thruway Authority like this:

Hey EZPass!

UCDsNutz?