Parents and grammar nazis tend to flip out at instant messaging -- because they worry the technology is ruining kids' ability to write correctly. All those short forms! WTF! OMG! We're breeding a nation of illiterates!

So I was intrigued to find a study of teenage IM chat that found that nu-wave short forms comprise a mere 2.4 per cent of their communications. University of Toronto professor Sali Tagliamonte spent two years examining the IM chats of 71 teenagers -- collecting over 1 million words. The result? Behold the periodicity of these following common short forms:

Frequency per 100,000 words:
LOL -- "laughing out loud": 195
omg -- "oh my god": 107
brb -- "be right back": 31
ttyl -- "talk to you later: 30
btw -- "by the way": 22
nvm -- "never mind": 7
gtg -- "gotta go": 5
np -- "no problem: 4
nm -- "not much": 3
lmao -- "laughing my ass off": 2

Hardly the sort of linguistic rot we've been led to believe, eh? "There's a misconception this is sloppy and ruinous," as Tagliamonte told the Toronto Star. "It's not. It demonstrates kids are really creative with their language. It's a medium that lends itself to brevity so they have developed these short forms."

Mind you, I'm not suggesting that too many kids these days aren't blithering illiterates. I regularly receive bleak, bleak reports from friends of mine who teach high school or even first-year college classes. But me, I'm old-school: I blame whole language. What a total train-wreck of a pedagogical approach.