I began learning text-shorthand back in high school, probably 10th or 11th grade – whenever I downloaded AIM for the first time. I resisted at first, mostly as a reaction to friends of mine whose IM’s were filled with misspellings and letter-omissions. It would be accurate to describe myself as somewhere between an apathetic-speller and a spelling-nazi – I never bothered correcting my friends’ spelling when it was off (mostly because the conversation never would’ve moved past that and no one would’ve talked to me online anymore), but I figured it was still possible to IM quickly and spell accurately. More to the point though, I began noticing everyone use text-shorthand, which wasn’t common-speech yet. I didn’t even know what lol meant at first, much less it’s variations – lmao, lmfao, rotflmao. I slowly picked up things at the speed that my internet could teach me them (not very fast at all), and I got a rudimentary grasp on lol-speak (as I’ve always called it). Eventually I began to incorporate smiley’s and what few other emoticons I happened to see others use – it was like learning a new language, watching the way other people used things and incorporating it all into my own IM-speech.
The funny thing, though, is that I began to have the urge to type a smiley or an lol in my school papers. I’d be typing and feel like a sentence needed to be punctuated with a 🙂 or a :/. They even began invading my thoughts – I’d hear something funny and think lol to myself. As I think about it now, the degree to which I gave myself to IM-speech just increased over time – at first I would think each letter of lol separately, but after a few years it would just come out as one word, as though it was a word.
In a way, though, I think emoticons and lol-speech are part of language. I probably use things more strictly than most people, but I think most people have rules to how they use emoticons, and you can read a person’s personality in them. You’d be confused if someone texted you “Today’s a beautiful day! :/” It seems silly to say “that 
shouldn’t be there, it doesn’t fit with the sentence,” but it’s entirely true. It’d be like saying “I feel so sharp today” – sure, that adjective can fit into that sentence, but it makes no sense until you explain yourself. Emoticons even have the ability to punctuate a sentence. Let’s take the sentence “tonight’ll be fun.” If you punctuate that with “tonight’ll be fun :P,” the reader can infer that there’s something sarcastic about that sentence – that 😛 functions like the rolling of your eyes or the inflection of your voice in a way. Or with IM-speech, take the sentence “I hate my life.” That by itself sounds like a pretty serious statement, but if it reads instead “I hate my life lol,” suddenly the person’s voice has a more carefree acceptance of things, like they’re laughing off whatever misfortune has happened.
It’s one of those things I find fascinating as part of our modern culture. These are additions that’ll never be part of official grammar – the books of the future won’t be written with “lol’s” and :)’s. But nearly everyone knows these anyways – they’re great for familiar conversations with friends via texting, IMing, email, etc. Their grammar is widely-known, though the rules are never written down or read about, and they don’t need to be. Linguists often comment on the slow progression of language, how it slowly changes over hundreds of years, but here we have a new kind of language that has shaped itself up relatively over night. Who knows, maybe someone can/has/will write something that starts to see what this new element of language can do. It’s just a fascinating development, and it almost makes me wanna start writing my school-papers with the occasional or btw. I’m sure my professors would be amused, 😛
The Nobody's Rambler 