Photo by Miriam Frost
Ladies, do you remember the last time you got a text from that special guy and wondered what his winky-face meant? Or guys, remember the last time a girl texted you and you thought, “What the hell is she talking about?”
When it comes to language, the battle of the sexes has been going on for centuries. Women try to express one or two feelings by writing an essay, while men tend to explain multiple feelings in 160 characters or less.
Well, it’s time to stop banging your head against the wall. The UR Hajim School of Engineering has recently announced their newest feat: URTXT (as usual, the University has proven itself to be very creative when it comes to naming).
Believe it or not, URTXT is the world’s first text decoder. You thought it was too good to be true, but here is the answer to all your concerns. This simple device connects to your phone or computer and decodes any text message you want it to.
Gone are the days when you were hung up on every single word that the other person said, trying to pick up on some hidden clue within the message.
URTXT is virtually limitless when it comes to text decoding. For example, it can decode the word “hey” depending on how many Y’s it has. One Y usually translates to, “I need you to do something for me.” Two Y’s usually mean “I’m trying to sound like I’m actually excited to talk to you.” Three imply, “I’m attention deficient. Look at my text! Look at my text right now!” Anything beyond that suggests that you are dealing with someone who is high off of those cookies from Danforth.
Or how about those damn “lols”? Have you ever talked to someone online and started the conversation by saying, “What’s up?” and gotten back “nm, chilling in my room lol.” Well, put that into URTXT, and you get back two results.
One, the fact that the other person said “nm” means they don’t really want to talk to you.
Two, the “lol” in this sentence means, “I’m trying to make this less awkward since I don’t know what to say to you.” The latter result especially makes sense since all of us know very well that the other person is, in fact, not just sitting in his or her room laughing out loud — that would be ridiculous.
But the benefits don’t end there. URTXT takes into consideration the gender of the person who sent the message. A “talk to you later” from a girl usually means “tomorrow,” while for a guy it means, “whenever you decide to deal with me again.” And the dreaded word “whatever”? For a guy, it’s actually “I’m emotionally incapable of dealing with this” whereas for a girl it means, “I’m dying on the inside.”
URTXT can also help with decoding emails from professors. “Good luck!” usually means, “I don’t intend on curving,” while a “don’t worry” actually means, “you’re screwed.”
And don’t even get me started with emails from graduate schools. The whole, “We hope you will find that other institutions will be an excellent fit for your educational and personal goals” after saying they rejected you? URTXT will immediately decode that to, “What were you thinking when you applied here? Go to some other school that doesn’t expect a $1 million donation for an acceptance!”
It is important to note that URTXT is currently in the testing stages — the engineers are still trying to work out the kinks behind the whole “emotion” thing with language. But seeing that every single person talks the same way and means the same thing when saying certain words or phrases, this device should not take too long to be ready. Forget about getting to know someone personally and figuring what he or she means by saying certain things. URTXT will do all the work for us now.
URTXT will be hitting the market in early 2012.
Panda is a member of the class of 2015.
