MOBILE phone texting is all the rage. The phenomenon, which is popular especially among teenagers and young adults, has given rise to acronyms such as “paw” (parents are watching), “lol” (laughing out loud), “g2g” (got to go) and “ooc” (out of control).

There are a couple of reasons why the texting community has crafted such SMS lingo. For one, SMS messages are generally limited to a certain number of characters, so users have to condense their missives to fit more thoughts into a single message. What’s more, it’s often easier to type abbreviated messages using the number pad on the handset.

With the number of mobile phone users growing at an accelerated pace, the size of the texting community who thrive on using SMS lingo is increasing, too. Many find it cool to communicate this way.

But not everyone is impressed though, like Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who last week was quoted as saying that it is a linguistic crime to butcher the Engligh language for the sake of brevity. He went on further, saying that such writing is infiltrating even exam scripts and letters.

Knowing the already declining standard of English use among our students, his worries over the influence of SMS lingo are understandable.

Observers also have expressed concern that SMS texting could lead to impoverishment of the English language. Over time, those young fellas who are so used to writing abbreviated text may not be able to spell words correctly or construct a proper sentence. Eventually, they would not be able to even write a decent letter or article. Don’t be surprised, there are already cases of students using SMS lingo in school assignments!

But the SMS lingo phenomenon is difficult to contain. The community, unfortunately, has a life of its own, and growing. And the influence is spreading to others as well.

According to reports, big marketers across the globe also are getting hip with SMS lingo to entice the younger audience. Unilever, for example, is highlighting “OMG! Moments” for a new line of deodorant for teen girls.

PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay, McDonald’s, AT&T and others also have tried to demonstrate their street cred to the teenage set by using text messaging abbreviations in their commercials.

For example, an Internet video ad for McDonald’s in Korea shows two men warming up their vocal chords to sing the McDonald’s I’m Lovin’ It jingle. At the end of the video, a voice-over chimes in: “Are you ready?” The screen reads: “r u ready?”

Television is jumping onto the texting bandwagon, too. MTV is reportedly rolling out a new reality show called Paris Hilton’s My New BFF and its Web site is www.parisbff.com. “bff”, for the uninitiated, means “best friend forever”.

Brevity is bliss, some say. But the prospect of having a new generation of people growing up embracing SMS lingo is not quite comforting.