When Texting Slang Evolves with Age: From LOL to Flying Car Disasters - A Sardonic Look at Modern Communication and Technology Fails.

How Digital Communication Changes as We Age: Plus China's Latest Aerial Innovation Gone Wrong.

You know, for the most part, humour just naturally pours out of me like a tap. I don't have to think too much about it, because it's just there. My natural self, finding sometimes that fine thread of observation that creates mental pictures which translate into text. Whereas, on other days, something captures a thought that needs deeper working on, and I have to engage the semi-retired part of my brain for a change and do actual work. Take my article from a couple of days ago, titled 'Trump v Starmer.' Now, something like that takes more thought. So, I make both mental and digital notes as cues. I think, rewrite, rewrite again, and slowly begin to construct a mental draft, before committing my fingers to the keyboard. Hence, I'm always slightly behind the curve when finally publishing. Will it be delivered sardonically or more seriously? Do I want it to sound forensically detailed or an easy read? Decisions, decisions, indeed.

But not today. No, today my mind is again pouring with, well, you should know by now, shouldn't you? So, yet again, in another twisted diversion down a labyrinth of unsolicited thoughts, and don't ask how or why, as not even I know, but I began to wonder if short-code text slang of abbreviations and acronyms changed as we get older? If 'LOL' suddenly changes meaning to 'Living Older Life'? LMAO, suddenly becomes 'LMFTO' as in, 'Laughing My False Teeth Out.' 'BTW' - Bring The Wheelchair.' 'TTYL' - Talk To You Louder.' 'BYOT' - 'Bring Your Own Teeth.' 'ROFL' - Rolling Over For Lumbago.' 'BRB' - Bathroom Really Badly.' 'OMG' - Oh My Glucosamine.' 'WTF' - Who's That Farting?' 'TBH' - To Be Honest... I Forgot.' 'FML' - Found My Laxatives.'

Of course, the real tragedy isn't that our texting evolves—it's that eventually we won't be able to text at all. Those nimble thumbs that once fired off messages faster than machine-gun rounds will develop arthritis so severe that typing becomes an Olympic sport. Our eyes, once eagle-sharp enough to spot a typo from three screens away, will require reading glasses so thick they could double as magnifying glasses for starting fires. And our memory? Well, by then we'll have forgotten what texting even was, staring blankly at our phones like confused cavemen discovering fire. The ultimate irony being that just when we've finally mastered the art of senior citizen abbreviations, our bodies will have given up on communication entirely. Which is probably for the best, really, because by then we'll need all our concentration just to avoid getting flattened by a plummeting flying car. 'TTFN' - 'Ta-ta for now'... and quite possibly 'Taxi Tumbling From Nowhere.'

And so, as that labyrinth closed for temporary renovation, my attention turned to a news item from China, where a trial run of flying cars, yes, you read that correctly, didn't quite go as planned amid a small crowd of bewildered and totally unimpressed onlookers. Well, folks, buckle up, because the future is here! And by "here," I mean occasionally plummeting from the sky with all the grace of a drunken ostrich attempting ballet. Yes, China, ever the innovator, is leading the charge in the race for flying cars. And what a spectacularly disastrous charge it's been! So far, the price of progress has been a mere two mid-air collisions, or as I like to call them, "enthusiastic high-fives between very expensive prototypes that clearly didn't read the memo about personal space." You see, whilst the rest of the world is still trying to figure out if we can get a decent internet connection on a bloody train, China is out there having their eVTOLs play the most expensive game of bumper cars ever conceived—at 500 feet above ground, naturally, because why settle for ordinary catastrophe when you can have gravity-assisted disaster with a side of shattered dreams?

The official reports, naturally, describe these incidents as "minor technical adjustments during routine testing procedures"—corporate speak that roughly translates to "Oh bollocks, our flying taxi just performed an unscheduled interpretive dance with another flying taxi, and now we have very expensive confetti scattered across several city blocks." Apparently, the collision avoidance systems were working perfectly, which raises the delightful question of what exactly they were avoiding, because it certainly wasn't each other. Perhaps they were programmed to avoid common sense? Or maybe success? One witness described the scene as "like watching two very determined metal birds having a territorial dispute," which is possibly the most poetic way anyone has ever described a multi-million-pound engineering cock-up. The pilots, bless their optimistic hearts, reportedly walked away with nothing more than bruised egos and the sudden realisation that their CVs might need updating. Meanwhile, the ground crew spent the afternoon playing the world's most expensive game of "find the spare parts," armed with nothing but brooms, bin bags, and what I can only assume was a rapidly diminishing sense of career satisfaction.

Writing from Bristol, England - where I keep my feet firmly on the ground and my satire at maximum altitude.

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