Check the Gif until the end before you send

Did you know that the WhatsApp has got all these Gifs readily available for you? I didn’t notice it until recently one of my friends started replying back only using those Gifs. It was pretty annoying but some of them were very cute. So as a reply to one of the text messages I sent the below Gif instead of this emoji (a flying kiss one) 😘. I did not see the whole Gif. I saw only the first few seconds of it when I sent it. I managed to see it fully after I sent it and realized that it wasn’t what I had meant it to be. 😯

Damn! It was a little bit embarrassing but we had a good laugh. At least I did.  Just be careful when you do send the Gifs, yeah?

WhatsThat

Pongal – a Festival of Harvest, is celebrated today in TamilNadu. My folks always keep me updated with all that is happening over there, thanks to a Family WhatsApp group. Even though for the most part I have muted that group and pitch in only once in a while, it still is one that gives me all the latest news over there, including the movie which my brother is going to take his family to. He is the main contributor to the group along with my aunt. My mother and my husband are the viewers (ones who send out a message once a month in that group as a response to someone). Who would have thought that such a thing would exist a couple of years ago? And that my mom would be texting and WhatsApp-ing me? 🙂 Even though I am slightly wary of the technological advances, I do appreciate its effort in bringing the people you love closer to you, even without FaceBook.

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Post for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt.

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday and Just Jot It January is: A word that starts with “P.” Find a word that begins with the letter “p,” and make it the theme of your post. Bonus points for starting and ending your post with a “p” word. Enjoy!

SoCS Badge by John Holton@ The Sound of One Hand Typing

Is Texting good for the language ?

I came across this video yesterday and liked it. We all text. I used to not text much earlier, what with my earlier primitive phone and its small and hard keys and my big fingers, which ain’t a good combination at all. But with the new touch screen and a bigger and cooler phone and thanks to WhatsApp and the groups that I am part of, my texting has increased almost by 75% if not more. And half the time the auto correct does the work by itself by suggesting appropriate words even before I could think of them, even though there have been times when it has done more damage. Not to mention the spell check facility. That doesn’t still prevent me from interchanging words like magnanimous and magnificent or humming tree and hanging tree… I ain’t no linguist but then texting at this age does help a lot and yes, as this professor says, I wouldn’t use the same abbreviations  (even though I don’t do that unless I am tired or pissed off) I use on my texts when I actually write something else like this post or an email etc. It would be very weird.  What do you think ? Do you agree with the professor ? Is your vote yes or no, on this topic ?

What’s that app?

I ain’t on Facebook, irrespective of the fact that I am there as part of my friend’s posts, but then since I ain’t being tagged and for the fact that I don’t have an account over there (pseudo or not) I can claim that I am not there, yet (even in spite of being pressured a lot recently). But ever since I joined gym last year, I am on Whatsapp (even when I had my old phone with access to very less data using 2G) because the timings or any updates to my classes were done through Whatsapp. I am not fond of texting and try to avoid it as much as possible. That in turn means that I don’t take part in the Whatsapp conversations unless and otherwise it is necessary.

I literally groaned my frustration when my brother created a Family Whatsapp group and included all of my family members (yup, the only one who was left was my Mom who got an Android phone as a gift from my brother for her birthday last year and he set it up for her with an email account and loaded it with enough games for her to spend her free time). My brother is too much into all these social media stuff. He is the one who introduced me to blogging (even though he doesn’t do it anymore) and I will be grateful for that. But he texts too much for my comfort. But imagine my surprise when my sister also gets a little bit more involved in texting in Whatsapp, sharing the photos of kids, their daily activities, their fights, normal chit chat of the day and this inspite of them being in the same town and much closer to each other. No wonder my dad went running for the hills in a day or two , in other words , it means he left the group 😉 My mom is still figuring stuff out and I haven’t spoken to her yet on this to get her feedback on her view of this whole new text world. So yeah, suddenly everyone is on Whatsapp (well because every one has a phone now, duh!) irrespective of whether they are on Facebook or not. There are lots and lots of groups created to communicate (my brother told me that there is a 60+ member group he is part of , which consists of members of a whole village, imagine that), people share forwards and all those stuff they did earlier through FB using Whatsapp groups.

And not to mention the famous blueticks and the set of jokes and repercussions that it triggered when that got enabled. Blueticks should be used only when you really need to know if the other person received the message or not and not for why they haven’t replied. If you are able to disassociate receiving and replying you can live in peace with it. I just don’t care about it, blue or gray. What triggered this rant like post on Whatsapp ? Well this article, where they were talking about the growing numbers in Whatsapp. If every single person who has a phone and with the data getting cheaper (comparatively) start using Whatsapp instead of texting over Facebook it is obvious the numbers will grow exponentially. And I know I am already part of that when I got added to the Family group in Whatsapp. And I am already considering the mute option on them.

 

Also part of JustJoJan