A Word to the Wise
9-26-18 If you don’t text with kids, you may not know what LOL means, or GTG or LMS. What about KYS? Do you know what that means? KYS; one of the shorthand messages that’s been in popular social media use since its inception. Trying to figure out exactly where it first began is sort of like trying to discover exactly who first used ‘OK’ to mean ‘yes.’ Regardless, it’s either a smart-aleck remark or a dangerous prod. In case you don’t know, KYS is an acronym for ‘kill yourself,’ and our kids have been seeing it and using it in texts, memes and via smartphone apps for years. What the big boys do at the high school level trickles down to the children in elementary school, and those who bring their smartphones to school (roughly half of elementary age kids have one by the time they’re 8), know what it means when someone says KYS. On top of that, “Why don’t you just kill yourself?” has become increasingly common in the school age population as a spoken put-down, of sorts, and it’s worse ...