Meet Morgan, queen of SMS

IT'S a pursuit only for the fleet of thumb with a ruthless dedication to punctuation. And while competitive text-messaging may not have gained Olympic status, the hundreds of mostly teenagers who took part in the US championships in New York over the weekend could think of little but the $US25,000 ($29,900) prizemoney.

About 250 challengers battled it out for a chance to take on the reigning West Coast champion, 21-year-old Eli Tirosh, for the title of US Texting Champion. Contestants had to stand with their hands behind their backs until a bell sounded and a message appeared on an overhead screen. The winner was judged on whoever's message - checked for exact punctuation - reached the judges first.

The text tests ranged from "Faster than a speeding bullet ..." and "What we do in life echoes in eternity" to the less poetic but urgent "OMG, nd 2 talk asap," which (for those over 30) means "Oh my God, need to talk as soon as possible."

The 250 competitors were quickly whittled down to eight semi-finalists, one of whom, Anne Finn, 24, of Allegany, New York, said the pressure became too much.

"It was so nerve-racking. My hands started to shake. I couldn't get my apostrophe," she said.

In the end, 13-year-old Morgan Pozgar faced off against Michael "Cheeser" Nguyen in the east coast final, with Pozgar slipping past her challenger to face west coast champion Tirosh, a law student from Los Angeles.

"I just wasn't fast enough," said Nguyen, 23, an engineer from Pennsylvania.

Asked how it felt to take second place, he was clearly disappointed: "I just got beaten by a teenage girl, but you know."

Lightning speed and accuracy

Tirosh said she practised with her friend and trainer Amy, who threw out random words or symbols and even motivational Buddhist quotes.

Wearing a satin boxing robe before her championship bout against Pozgar, she said success would come down to who could marry lightning speed with accuracy. "It's all about the thumb-work," she said.

So dedicated is she to the art of the text message that Tirosh apparently unwittingly uses initial-phrases such as BTW (by the way), TTYL (talk to you later) and LOL (laughing out loud) in her normal speech.

Pozgar said she trained by sending on average 8000 text messages a month to her friends - an astonishing rate of one every 5 1/2 minutes. She pays $US10 ($12) a month for an unlimited text package on her mobile phone.

In a tense championship final, Tirosh seemed to have won after putting down her phone first, only for judges to rule she had made an $18,000-dollar typo in the lyrics to the Mary Poppins song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Pozgar, who wants to work in fashion, had no hesitation about how to spend her prize money - $US10,000 for the east coast championship and $US15,000 for the national award. She was going to hit the stores in New York City. Phone in hand, no doubt.

With AFP