Thursday, August 13, 2009

10 Commandments in Text ... the full story

10 4u
no1 b4 me
no omgs
no wrk on sun
m&d r cool
dnt kill
sx only w m8
dnt steal
no lies
dnt ogle ur bf's m8
nor ur bf's stuf

So, I was reading the Tablet - not the Tablets (ho ho, or as they say in txt lol), but the weekly catholic paper, which I know is not exactly universally popular with all my Catholic friends (but we'll leave that for the moment) and saw a version of the Ten Commandments in text speak.

I say 'a version' because they followed the Protestant rather than the Catholic numbering. Don't worry, the full text is the same, but for the first 1500 years of Christianity the commandments were always set out in the same way, until Luther and friends tried to change everything. The full Catholic (original) version - for those who wish to check it - can be found here.

So I thought - I bet they could be tweeted ... it took a few minutes of adapting, including getting the Catholic numbering, and squeezing them down to a little fewer than 140 characters (allowing a little space for all my admirers to RT - retweet - my plagiarism with my name at the top - oh Vanity of Vanities).

And here, above, you can see the result. Which I feel very smug about. This an offense against humility, of course, which while not explicitly included in the 10, is very much in their spirit.

So all in all a self-defeating exercise when I could have got a lot more work done.

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