> Plus, it was short. Text messages originally came with a 160-character limit. That's why people developed text message shorthand, like lol for "laughing out loud."
Is this correct? I always thought it was coined on some bulletin board or chatroom.
Is this correct? I always thought it was coined on some bulletin board or chatroom.
I was surprised to learn that "tnx" was an early morse code convention (lol is 'hihi'). Oh and seeing the phrase "tricked out" in a book from I think the 1800s (via Gutenberg.org) was also surprising.
A laugh is actually just "hi", although sometimes it would be repeated if conditions were noisy. Then it would be "hi hi" with a space in between, not all sent as one word.
So why was "hi" used to indicate a laugh in Morse in the first place? There's no obvious connection with either the word "hi" or the individual letters "h i".
The reason is that the meaning here is not in the actual letters or word, it's the sound of "hi" in Morse:
• • • • • •
It just sounds funny to hear that. A bit reminiscent of the rhythm of the old phrase "shave and a haircut, two bits" but more concise.
Oddly, many hams to this day also use "hi" or "hi hi" in voice contacts instead of laughing. I guess that's not too different from saying "lol" out loud!
"es" is another interesting abbreviation. This of course is the Spanish word for "and", but hams always use "es" instead of "and" in Morse. It's one letter shorter, but that's not the real reason. Here's "and":
• ——— ——— • ——— • •
• • • •
I'm confused. The Spanish word for "and" is "y". Maybe you meant that hams use "es" instead of "is"?
Now I'm not sure what the derivation of "es" is. It's definitely used to mean "and", but I don't know why.
In any case, thanks for the correction.
Update: I just figured out where I got the mixed up Spanish connection! There is a Spanish word used as a Morse code abbreviation, and in fact it's used in every QSO. It's not "es", it's "de" which means "from" both in Spanish and on CW/Morse. So I had the right idea, wrong word.
hi hi tks es 73 de WJ6V
It's 160 chars over 120 bytes using a special 7 bit encoding. However, if you fall back to ASCII it's 120, or if you're using a wide character encoding it drops to 60. But as someone else says we have concatenated SMS these days to cater for the longer messages.