Reuters has an article that talks about a "new language" that's growing in popularity among teens in the UK (and pretty much every other country, we suspect) who live and breathe the mobile phone culture.

You may have seen, or even used, this texting language that, as Reuters explains, replaces a word with the "first alternative that comes up on a mobile phone using predictive text." Examples pointed out in the article include replacing "cool" with "book" and "pub" into "sub." These substitutions make the messages look like some sort of code to anyone who isn't in the know.

These replacement words are referred to as textonyms, adaptonyms or cellodromes. The official term, according to Reuters, is "paragram."

It's enough to make anyone with a college degree feel illiterate. And old.

Image courtesy: Jupiterimages Unlimited.