lieu of an adjective or noun. Generally it can be quite expressive or emotive.

- Mulder

David Crystal said '“The real issue here is that people object to kids having a good vocabulary for hip-hop and not for politics. 

They have an articulate vocabulary for the kind of things they want to talk about. Few academics get anywhere near measuring that vocabulary.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/6960745/Teenagers-only-use-800-different-words-a-day.html

All speakers, in fact, resort to discourse particles because of the 'inadequacy of our language to satisfactorily express our thoughts'. Further, as linguistic Suzanne Fleischman has discovered, there is an equivalent of English 'like' in a myriad of other languages, such as Japanese, Russian, Finnish, Hebrew, Lahu, Swedish and Bislama. This includes 'genre' in French, 'como' in Spanish, 'tipo' in Italian and 'so' in German, and even Ancient Greek is thought to have a 'quotative like'.'

"Research has made it clear that the early media hysteria about the novelty (and thus the dangers) of text messaging was misplaced. In one American study, less than 20% of the text messages looked at showed abbreviated forms of any kind - about three per message. And in a Norwegian study, the proportion was even lower, with just 6% using abbreviations. " --David Crystal

(http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/05/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview )

Mr McCrindle advises parents against adopting the language themselves to try to appear 'coo'.

"Observe their language and I guess understand and relate to it. Don 't be dismissive or condescending of it," he says.

"We tend to put on the adult hat and say it lacks proper grammar and structure, but it does show incredible innovation and creativity."

Professor of Applied Languages Studies at The University of Queensland, Roly Sussex, agrees and doesn't believe such creativity should be stifled.

Professor Sussex says text messaging and emailing are encouraging this generation of young people to write.