Yep. ☺️

Basically how every 90s chat room session started.

ASL?

What elephant?

Dang it!

Actually… it might have been a 🐧 that I saw…

This seems way too logical. It almost sounds even correct.

But… I’m pretty confident there’s gnomes involved.

Most definitely the last one. 😁

100% this. There are very specific kinds of communities that I gravitate towards. Forums, link aggregators, and the older social platforms like FB where are you friend actual friends. The lack of high-speed internet and mobile data made a lot of the other platforms less accessible to me as I’ve lived around the world. When you have a data budget, you don’t tend to use media centric services where people scroll through content rapidly. I’ve also never really been into “following” strangers. I’ve only recently started doing it on Pixelfed because it helps further define the kind of photography and art I’m interested in looking at.

I pick things up and figure things out over time. Like 4chan green text which I never understood, but would see quoted on Lemmy or Reddit. I’ll figure out these abbreviations and manners of speech as well… eventually…haha.

This is interesting.

My lack of experience on most socials isn’t helping. I’ve never used Snapchat Twitter Instagram tiktock etc. Pixelfed was my first venture into that realm, but i only use it as a person gallery and to check out interesting photography from others. I know it’s modeled on Instagram, which has grown beyond that quite a bit, but that’s never been for me though.

Anyway, thanks for the insight.

It’s a cold message from a stranger on a platform that doesn’t have call support.

The first half is sort of what I got out of it, though.

Thanks.

Thank you Chat GPT for translating this one for me. Haha.

🧓🏽

EDIT: I quizzed my three kids from different generations.

Eldest didn’t know know wsg, but middle child did.

Currently, my 10-year-old is running around me in circles calling me an "unc"le.

Smh

They sent a private message to ask if they could privately ask something? That’s really really strange to me.

And if they’re starting the message implying that I’m not in trouble, then that makes it even more confusing because I have no reason to think I would be in trouble.

But if this is a now common way of communicating with people, then I genuinely want to understand that. I simply never read or heard any examples of it from a stranger out of the blue.

The main reason I’m not indulging it is simply because I get multiple spam messages via SMS each week. They all start with an attempt to phish for somebody’s attention. Something as simple as saying “hello” or “are you still going to make it tonight?” Then it’s revealed that, whoops wrong number, and they start trying to interact with you (because, why not, it’s friendly) and eventually phish for information. It’s a pretty common scheme.

At first I used to have fun responding, but after doing more reading on the scheme and the unfortunate people who are being used to send those kinds of messages, I realized makes things worse for the person being forced to do that work.

What threw me off about this one is that I couldn’t understand it. And for that reason, it made me wonder if it really was spam in the first place. I mean I’ve seen grammatically incorrect spam all the time, but this one could be intentional. So I figured I’d see if other people fully understood what it meant.

Well, to be honest, language is always hard to understand if you’ve never heard the words ( or acronyms) used in the first place. That’s the nature the ignorance.

Out of genuine curiosity, if you were to translate the original message into plain grammatically correct English, how would you translate it?

Most people, regardless of language, use slang. Including myself. When it comes to acronym use though, I don’t often use text acronyms. I understand most early ones, but newer ones pop up now and again.

I’ve heard ‘what’s good’, but never a text acronym of wsg. After my daughter mentioned that, it made sense. (Although I proceeded to forget and you’re reminding me again of what it means. Haha.)

“No disrespect” is something I think I would normally understand given some context, but this message is out of the blue from a stranger I’ve never interacted with. I honestly thought that if this message wasn’t spam and I responded, they were going to be critical or rude about something and they were perhaps trying to soften the blow upfront. Ironically, that seems to be the opposite of what your suggesting. 🤷🏽

Language can be funny.

Exactly my thought. Never heard the term “engagement bait”, but it smells right. 🙂

Those are pretty amusing links. 😁

The jnteresting thing about politeness is how it varies between cultures and persons. Things really can very widely.

I personally can’t imagine emailing someone only to ask “may I ask you a question” rather than asking the question itself, but I suppose that might be more polite with some folks?

In the case of this original message, I literally have no idea what half of it meant. English isn’t my first language, but I think I’ve got it pretty down. This was a whole new (generational?) level. 😅

I’m curious about your response.

Since text messages can be answered any time, at any speed, I can’t imagine why it would be rude to just ask or how time availability would be an issue. Do you find yourself similarly texting and asking if people can text (immediately)?

Just feels like phishing… with the weirdest phishing message I’ve ever read as bait.

Yeah. It’s not like you only get one message with X characters. They could have just got to the point. 😁

Seems more like the one of the wrong number sms spams. Those can actually be pretty fun to respond to for awhile. 🙃

Ohh. That would be a great thread to start here. Share your most amusing SMS phishing exchanges.😁

I suppose the correct answer has something to do with learning to love yourself or some such… But…

Our bodies really can be quite inconvenient and frustrating at times.

💜

The bane of adult responsibilities. Never allowing us to just play play play all time time. 😁

Perhaps you and I need to make a gaming pact to force ourselves to actually finish? 🙃

Seriously, why did I invest all those hours only to leave an excellent game unfinished!? 🤦🏽