Girls Teach Teen Cyber Gab to FBI Agents
A trio of Howard County (MD) 8th-graders help the FBI to learn the IM lingo in order to catch pedophiles. I’d always wondered how a horny guy could think a middle-aged male FBI agent was a 13-year-old girl. Now I know.
dear god.
From the article:
Well, that explains a lot.
HOTGIRL400230: Like, oh my god, Agent Scully is such a bitch!
I weep.
I think it’s, like, terrific. Why not go to the source? They realized they just didn’t know how to talk like the, ya know, kids of today, so they asked some kids to, like, help them out. Good on 'em.
Wow, I am, like, so not good at talking like an eighth grade girl. Like, bummer.
Holy cow…
Does this remind anyone else of the movie “Dick”?
Official White House Dog Walkers…Official FBI Teenspeak Trainers…
ur soo hot…do u want 2 meet l8r @ da mall? :rolleyes:
I agree with lightingtool; why does everyone here seem to have some kind of problem with this? I think it’s a terrifically practical solution to an extraordinarily widespread and serious problem, and I thought the article was both hilarious and charming. When I IM my 17-year-old sister, I’m sure she tones down her use of, uh, whatever they call the way kids are speaking these days.
Granted, the conversation sounds boring and idiotic to my ears, but that’s OK; I’m long past being anything resembling hip (thank heaven), and the whole point of it is to exclude us grown-up losers from The Club. Let 'em play; they’ll grow up and learn hard lessons soon enough.
(I’m also reminded of Cecil’s great column “What the heck is ‘leetspeek?’.”)
Maybe I’m misreading this thread, but I don’t see where “everyone” had some kind of problem with it. (Shirley and maybe World Eater, I guess, but they’re not everyone, are they?)
I’m a member of some newsgroups where I occasionally get messages written like this (to quote a portion of one):
and I thought the article was hilarious. Thinking about FBI agents writing like my above example cracks me up.
But then again, I love the movie Dick. 
Hmm, on re-reading, you’re right. I should pay more attention.
It’s pretty clear that nobody who is trying to be funny here has any idea how young people speak online.
It’s not the same as how you seem to think young girls speak in person, which seems to be a simplistic version of Valley Girl. Nobody writes out nearly as many "like"s as they say. It’s more similar to what LilyoftheValley quoted, though it doesn’t have to be quite that incomprehensible. Here’s a quote from a conversation I had with a teenager:
It’s just that the very idea of these sharp, intelligent, highly trained agents, trying to emulate a teenage girl, is both comic and tragic.
<bangs head on keyboard>
Maybe english isn’t their first language, i notice all the names are spanish.
Actually, you’re right, in this case. She was Mexican, but from what I could tell, quite fluent in English.
Is that kind of prowling on the net really that prevalent? I think it likely to be 90% myth and exaggeration.
Our tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen. I think we should get line item vetos.
I think it’s a marvelous idea. A lot of people might not realize that George Clooney, who is old enough to be many of these children’s parents isn’t considered cute to them (and for the record, he’s 42, not, like, 50 as those girls thought). How else can these agents learn what’s cool or not in order to fool pedophiles? I can’t tell them. I could read magazines, search the Internet and watch TV and still have no clue as to what is cool to young teens.