Jackcoms i fell has got most of the answer. TXT msgs used to be limited to 135 characters. SO if you had a lot to say, you had to work out some way of saying it in a shorter way. Hence TXT;text msgs;messages 2mora;tomorrow.

but there is the fact that a phone has only 10 keys to type in the alphabet with. so if you make the word shorter it's quiker to type, it's not one press per letter, as on a keyboard. for house its 2(h)3(o)2(u)4(s)2(e), 13 presees for a 5 letter word. Any suprise is got shortned to hse, 8 presses, almost half the effort.

Now that predictive texting has arrived, and many phones can split a long message and send in sections, i predict TXT will eventually die out, as phone makers do away with the option to turn predictive texting off (more memory/processor power in the phone, so a bigger dictianory, and software that learns which words you use and which you don't), and the lenght of message you can send gets bigger. then voice recogition will arrive, aand you wont be able to spell it wrong, even if you can't spell it to start with.

IMHO