The Internet has spawned a whole new subdivision of the language.  I do not refer to legitimate neologisms, such as ".com" or "dotcom," "website," and "homepage," but to the new shorthand that looks like this:  "Thnk u 4 ur msg i rly preshate it" (Thank you for your message. I really appreciate it.).

This kind of arbitrary use of abbreviations and (more or less) phonetic spelling makes several statements about the author, none of them complimentary:  1) He or she is lazy.  Just how much effort is required to use the shift key to distinguish the pronoun I  from the letter i or to mark the first word of a sentence? 2) He or she is probably a bad speller and wants to hide this unpleasant truth. 3) He or she is oblivious to the function of punctuation, regards it as mere decoration, and therefore has (from sheer ignorance) discarded it. 4) He or she is unaware that the purpose of writing is to communicate as clearly as possible with the reader, not to present symbols to be decoded.  A writer's first obligation is to make the reader's task easy.  Writing in code arrogantly ignores this silent contract that exists between reader and writer.

Furthermore, this style of writing (though style is too dignified a term for it) reveals a juvenile propensity to adopt anything that is new, with no consideration to whether it is good or bad.  It says: "Whoa!  Look at me! Ain't I trendy and cute."  Sorry, baby, you "ain't"; you are just an annoying and immature hack, with no comprehension of or respect for civilized communication.

I reluctantly concede some minor exceptions.  For instant messaging or real-time, online communications – particularly those that are one-to-one – shorthand is permissible because of time constraints, provided the parties in the exchange both (or all) agree to it.  For expressing emotional reactions visually (via emoticons or agreed-upon acronyms such as LOL for Laughing Out Loud), Internet lingo has a limited value.

Otherwise, Internet shorthand is an abomination.  It is linguistic anarchy, a frightening symbol of the "dumbing down" of communication.  Internet shorthand is to writing what aboriginal grunts are to speech.