T9 is so book

February 12th, 2007 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0) |

I have been meaning to post about this for a while. Apparently, people are using the word “book” as a synonym for “cool”.

While in T9 mode for text-messaging (also known as T9word or just Word), which predicts text as you type it on the alphanumeric keypad, “book” is created with the same keystrokes as “cool” – by pressing 2-6-6-5. “Book” comes up first (I think T9 has a programmed hierarchy of which words, arranged by which ones are used more often), and to get to the word “cool”, you simply press “Next”, which is usually the 0 key.

Of course there are many, many of these synonyms, which have been coined “T9onyms”. Sadly, I have many of them memorized. For example, when I am texting and I want to say the word “me” by pressing 6-3, I know that “of” always comes first so I will have to press “Next”. When I fell off a trailer last August, I landed on my phone and broke the screen, but it was still somewhat usable. I had some speed-dials memorized, so I tried to text the phrase “Come home soon” to someone and because of T9onyms I accidentally sent “Come good room”.

I have since added “book” to my personal slang vocabulary and am growing quite fond of it. In fact, while writing this post I discovered T9.com, which is pretty book in its own right.