One of my favorite shows years ago was Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Funniest Things. I guess I should not be surprised that our son, Stephen, brings us new insights every day with his perspective on politics, college classes, programming, and the list goes on.
We were catching up with him last week about an article on the Internet, and he responded, “TL;DR.” When I asked what that stood for, he said it was Internet slang for “too long; didn’t read.”
I told him that was going to be the basis of a blog for sure as I researched it. The implication is that some online text being replied to has been ignored due to its length. The abbreviation is based on the principle that, if the writer does not invest the time to convey their message concisely, the reader is justified not investing the time to read it. Alternatively, it might mean that there is insufficient material of value or interest to justify the time required to read it. He let me know it was not a new term…
As I found, the phrase dates to 2003 and was added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online in 2013. But even before that, in the late 1800s, Mark Twain made famous the quote referencing a related concept, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Well there you go … if you needed more proof that today’s youth simply do not read and would rather watch videos, you now have it. It does take a lot of time to make a short, punchy, relevant, personalized message. This is precisely why we are seeing such universally positive reactions to our proactive, personalized video messaging.