I’m going to make an admission.

Texting sends me into orbit. I rarely do it with my fancy-shmancy smart phone. I’ll receive text messages on occasion. I might answer them, but my first rule is this: no more than six words. I don’t send text messages just to chat. They need to fulfill some kind of purpose, such as providing answers to direct questions.

OK, the one exception might be if my son and daughter-in-law send pictures of our granddaughter Emma, which occurs regularly and I love acknowledging them.

So …

Having said all that, I had a strange encounter the other day at work. Two salesmen at the car dealership where I worked asked me this question: “What does ‘NVM’ mean in a text message?” My two friends, both middle-aged but younger than I am, were trying to figure out what it meant. One of them reckoned it meant “not very mature.” Hmmm. That seemed to make sense, given that a lot of text messages are, well, very mature.

We chuckled among ourselves and then I left them to their wondering what the initials meant.

Then it dawned on me: I have a text messaging expert in my family. It’s my daughter-in-law, Stephanie. She’d know.

I called her. “Steph,” I said, “what do the letters ‘NVM’ mean when you send them in a text message?”

She answered immediately: never mind … although for an instant I wasn’t sure if that was the answer of if she was telling to, um, never mind.

That was the answer.

I found my friends and told them, “It means ‘never mind.'” They got it.

We all shared our limited knowledge of text-message lingo/abbreviations. OMG? Got it. LOL? Sure thing. LMAO? I got that one, too.

The rest of them don’t come quite so easily. NVM is now part of my text-message glossary.

However, do not expect me ever to use it, let alone any time soon.

Still, it’s good to have someone in the family who’s fluent in textspeak, to whom I can turn for quick translations.