It was a somewhat enforced absence as I was in hospital over Christmas being treated for kidney stones.

I think SMS stands for Short Message System, but I am open to correction on this point. You can type a message into a handphone and then send it to someone else who has a handphone. Very popular, as it costs much less than actually phoning someone. The point is, all the things that the extract was saying about IM's eventual deleterious effects on the language with l8r and so on were said a couple of years ago about teenagers using SMS.

Bingley

Bingley