Twitglish?!?

An observation I dont fully understand....

I use Tweetdeck to follow my Twitter feed and my work ones. I actually love the program, makes it wicked easy to keep track of things at a glance and I am all about that kind of efficiency. Because I use it for both work & personal I have a couple search columns loaded up with some fairly general search terms that bring up a completely random list of tweets that are most often completely unrelated, sometimes amusing and occasionally relevant to what I am looking for.

I have noticed though that a portion of this random feed of humanity speaks a complete different language. It is challenging to even try to read and translate this twitglish into comprehensible english. I noticed this special language a lot a couple weeks ago, it was a particularly chatty day I guess, and started watching my personal feed for it. I dont really pay much attention to my counts, but I think I follow somewhere around 175 people. These are all kinds of people; regular people like me, celebrities, news & sports stuff, random tweeters I find entertaining, all kindsa people. And none of them speak this special language (thanks to them all!). They use their vowels, manage to speak mostly coherent thoughts in 140 characters and I can read all of them without having to say them out loud to try to figure it out.

I usually just skim the Twitglish over. I very much doubt that I am missing much by not spending the time to translate them. But I do not get it. Its not phonetics. I know that not everyone is excellent at spelling, and im totally cool with typos, I make a lot of them...but this is just strange and very deliberate.  If I had any idea how to take a screen shot I would to show you what I am talking about.  If you have the ability to see tweets around you on your smart phone of choice check it out and you'll see this bizarre language. I warn you, it'll make your brain cramp up a little.

It is the deliberateness of it that makes me scratch my head. I've met a lot of people in my adventures and would say that very, very few of them weren't at least high school graduates. Even those that may not have graduated from high school attended school for a a good number of years before leaving for whatever reason. Basic reading, writing and spelling is taught early, like what...1-6th grade? I think it is safe to say just about all of us made it that far with varying degrees of success...but we made it. And I kind of figure if your smart enough to figure out the Twitters there's an even better chance that you've made it out of high school and beyond....

So why Twitglish? Some may argue its the 140 character thing...but I disagree. You can be brief without your tweet reading like the random ramblings of an intelligent toddler. Use your words people!