By Barbara Condren
REHI RUTHERE? RUUP4LUNCHTOM? SOKIFURBZ EMMYT R T@UL HHTYAY,H&K, Karen*. If you understood that, you are already up to date with the Communication Evolution. I received this mumbo jumbo via my e-mail, via someone’s cell phone(??)  My response, via e-mail, was, “Did you have your fingers on the wrong keys when you sent me that message??”
Where did this all begin?  Well, I wasn’t there, but I imagine that when man first met woman, he didn’t have the use of words to say, “Hey, you look great, want to go have dinner and watch the sun go down?”  He probably used some kind of sign language to get his point across.
Somewhere later in time, he probably started grunting his needs and wishes to her and, then even later, someone probably started figuring out how to write down those sounds with some kind of lettering. Then they started teaching other people how to interpret that lettering and how to sound it out into verbal communication (or vice versa).
Lo and behold, we were able to walk up to someone and have a conversation, or an exchange of information, feelings or ideas. Wow.
Groups of us could even get together in a room and talk among ourselves. It was great. Of course, we kept writing down things in this new type of communication for others to read for themselves or read to others. We could even send our written thoughts and ideas to other people by mail.
It was exciting to get written mail from the postal delivery person. We could ponder what had been sent and re-read it to our heart’s content. We found a faster way of getting our thoughts down on paper with the typewriter. Suddenly, volumes of typed words were available in books, magazines, newspapers and other publications.
Somewhere in that timeline the telephone was also adopted by households everywhere. You could call anyone you wanted to talk to without the hassle of trying to find them to talk to them in person.
You probably already know where I’m going with this, but I’ll carry on. In more recent times, some electronic genius, probably at IBM or somewhere, came up with the idea for computers.  It started rather slowly, but caught on quickly. Soon everyone wanted one in their home. But that wasn’t enough.
Someone had to figure out how to get those computers to talk to each other—in a whole new language. We couldn’t read that language, but the computers translated it for us. Double wow!
Now we could communicate in writing at least at the speed of our computers. The Internet was born and everyone started spending hours in front of their computers (including “Moi”), reading the written word electronically. We don’t get correspondence by mail delivery very often anymore, but we can still communicate via e-mail!
No longer do you have to look up phone numbers or even know the address of their home in order to talk to someone or mail them something. All you need is their e-mail address. It’s so much simpler to remember than a phone number and a home address, right? You can conduct business, exchange news about your family, share your latest photos (in case your friends and family have forgotten what you actually look like) and it it’s a lot faster than arranging a lunch date and wasting time eating and talking for an hour or so.
But wait, cell phones are getting more and more popular, so maybe you have to keep track of cell phone numbers for all of your friends and family.  But, no problem, your cell phone does all the work for you. They’re just a push-of-a-button away.  And, if you happen to miss someone on a cell phone call, you can always just leave them a message and you won’t have to waste time talking to them—Just trade messages back and forth. That works. Right?
Oh, but the Evolution of Communication doesn’t stop there. No! The little numbered keyboards on the cell phones were surely good for something more than inputting phone numbers. Yes! Someone figured out how to squeeze the entire typewriter keyboard onto a cell phone—back to the typewriter, in a sense—and an even newer language was created.
It was out of necessity really, because typing a complete sentence or even a complete word on those miniature keyboards just simply takes too long, especially if you’re trying to type a message while you’re driving a motor vehicle! (For heaven sake!) Some messages are just too important to wait until you’ve come to a stop somewhere.
Ta-da! Text messaging has been born. Some of my friends are really into this.  So, if I hope to have any communication with them at all, I guess I have to go to some sort of text messaging school or find a dictionary of some sort to tell me what they’re trying to communicate to me.
So, we’ve gone full circle, almost. From sign language, to written letters, to verbal face-to-face communication (or vice versa), to talking by phones or sending messages by e-mail, (still, at least using complete words and sentences), and now to the latest form of communication—using just letters that we have to interpret back into words and sentences.
What’s next? Back to sign language? Oh, wait, that won’t work. We would have to actually see someone face-to-face in order to communicate using signs. Darn!
*Note:  This was an actual message I received from a friend before the holidays via her Blackberry, (it said) —(What the heck is that? —just kidding, I know!). For the uninitiated, the message is “Hi again, are you there?  Are you up for lunch tomorrow? It’s OK if you’re busy.  E-mail me your thoughts, or talk at you later.  Happy Holidays to you and yours.  Hugs & Kisses, Karen.”  (The name has been changed to protect the guilty.)
P.S.  I did find an on-line dictionary for text messaging that I would have included here, for your information,  but unfortunately it’s “X” rated. Who comes up with this stuff?
Barbara Condren is a free-lance writer, of sorts, living not far from St. Louis, MO who, apparently, has been living in the country too long!