Here’s The Most Popular Text Speak In North And South Carolina

I guess every generation's parents makes the statement, "I just don't understand kids these days."  Most of the time it probably has to do more with actions that words.  However, with the advent of "text speak," just understanding our kids takes more work than ever.  Fun fact, the first known time "OMG" was used?  According to Smithsonian Magazine, in a letter to Winston Churchill in, wait for it, 1917!  Yup, what began in the second decade of the 20th century, has now run amok in the third decade of the 21st.  And I always wanted to give Prince credit for word abbreviations.

So just how rampant is "text speak" these days?  Well, the folks at WordTips undertook what had to be the most tedious word analysis project ever.  They looked at over 18 million tweets from more than 200 American cities, and then compared each region's word abbreviation tendencies.  The top 250 most commonly shortened words were deduced and here are the results.

Let's start with the obvious.  "LOL" ("laugh out loud" for those needing a primer) is ubiquitous.  For every 100,000 tweets, this abbreviation appears in nearly 1.4 percent.  From the "who knew" files, citizens of the state of Georgia are the biggest text speakers in the union.  Nearly six percent of every 100,000 tweets contain at least one abbreviated word.  The state with the least abbreviators?  Idaho, with just 2.1 percent of 100,000 tweets containing text speak.  What about North Carolina?  South Carolina?  CLICK HERE to find out if you're OTW to IDK or IDC.

TikTok has dethroned Google to become the world’s most visited website, new data has revealed.

Per The Independent, the viral video app ended the search engine’s dominance, which had seen it rank as the most popular domain for all of 2020 and the first part of 2021.

Google.com – which includes Docs, Calendar, Maps, Translate, Photos, Flights, News and more – was unable to compete with the budding social app, which now counts more than 1 billion active users around the world. TikTok.com also overtook Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Netflix -- all of which ranked above it last year.

One of the more obvious reasons for users flocking to TikTok this year has been the Covid-19 pandemic, which has forced people to spend more time indoors and away from real-life social gatherings. These online browsing patterns continued even when lockdown restrictions came to an end, with “the summer of freedom” creating an opportunity for users to refresh and update their social media accounts.

See some of our favorite TikToks of 2021 below.