text: why does everyone abbreviate things online? have we lost all forms of proper communication or can no one spell correctly?  i don't know what the abbreviations mean half the time. sometimes people want to answer more questions, so they wanna type faster, and they use abbreviations to answer questions faster.  take me, for example, usually i abbreviate things, but this past year i won the spelling uil contest.  people just want to make things go quicker by abbreviating. and about you being the only one not to understand them, sometimes it's just because most people that use/understand abbreviations are people that use the computer more or people that instant message.  pretty soon, you'll start to understand abbreviations as well.  no big, don't worry about it.