Predictive text is creating a new language among UK youth. Don't want to key-in the entire word? Just have your recipient memorize what the first alternative that your mobile phone's predictive text feature offers instead. Simple.

Take, "R U cycle? Book! Fancy an adds down the sub? There's a gr8 new carnage," for example. "Cool" becomes "book," "awake" becomes "cycle," "beer" becomes "adds," "pub" is "sub" and "barmaid" is "carnage." (Are you awake. Fancy a beer beer down the pub? There's a great new barmaid.) Reports Reuters, "Those expressing excitement with the old-fashioned text phrase "woohoo!," now use the far more hip "zonino!" instead."

Fuddy duddies also have to replace with what they know as "paragrams" with what teen users call textonyms, adaptonyms or cellodromes.

According to David Crystal, a language expert at Bangor University in Wales, the new language is the latest in a long history of kids' linguistic creations.

"Everybody plays with language," he told Reuters. "Playing with language isn't new. It's absolutely normal for kids to experiment like this.

"And it's important to remind adults that they did exactly the same thing when they were kids, they just didn't do it on mobile phones." Emembe-ra?

Creative writing teachers take note--along with social studies teachers who like to tap into subversive streaks in teens. Chinese political poets had neighboring characters express dissent in seeming vacuous verse. Similarly, reports Reuters:

Some of the most popular textonyms show intriguing links between the originally intended word and the one the predictive text throws up -- "eat" becomes "fat" and "kiss" becomes "lips," "home" is "good" and the vodka brand "Smirnoff" becomes "poison."

Source: Reuters, Textonyms give cell phone addicts a new language, by Kate Kelland