hehe ooops. I meant English SPEAKING teens, not specifically teens who are from Britain. To be honest, I've never spoken to any English teens (well there was one 18 year old chick, but she didn't speak/type like that and had a nice set of...uh back to the topic). My main rant comes from visiting too many US and Canadian based chat rooms/message boards where "internet lingo" runs rampant.
I'll admit that I use "shorthand" sometimes, such as "btw". In reality, I'm not really against all shorthand, but rather the butchering of words, such as dis, dat and wut. Shorthand is to save time typing out full words, and sometimes that's acceptable. But the thing that really annoys me is stuff like dis, dat and wut aren't actually much shorter or less typing than the actual spelling of those words. For instance "wutevah" is pretty much just as long as "whatever", but for some reason teens choose to use the retarded spelling.
I just can't take anyone seriously or think of them as intelligent when I see them spell like that. I know that is perhaps judgemental and ignorant on my behalf, but IMO (uh oh, shortand), since we can't actually see or hear each other speak over the internet, the only way to convey our "intelligence" is through our writing/posting.