What is it with shortening words that don't need to be shortened?

     I understand that we have acronyms and some words we have a short hand way of writing them such btwn for between. What I don't get is it seems we are on a shortening of word obsession. Other than writing for school where we know we will be graded we tend to write primarily in this short hand style. On the Internet you see people write this way. Lets take this sentence for example. "This needs to stay between me and you please and thanks." In short hand on line you would most likely be written this way, "this needs to stay btwn me n u please n thx." I would not say that this bothers me too much since the Internet communication is so fast that we did shorten some words so that we could be faster. At least the shortening of these words you can still make out the original word.

     I would say this post has been inspired by my little sister. She is 16 and in her junior year of high school. She keeps using the phrase "totes." It drives me absolutely crazy. It means totally but to me it is the plural of tote and when i hear this the image in my mind is of tote bags...I do not think that the word totally needs to be shortened into totes. I feel while talking to someone this shorter version is just silly. If some one ever responded to me, "Oh yeah, totes!" well I'd be like "what?"

     I feel as though short hand writing on line even though it has become mostly the only way people write online usually the short hand version can be easily linked with its original version and its something strictly linked to online communication. When silly short hand words start to become a part of our verbal communication is where I see the problem. I feel as though when people speak in online short hand, they come off as lazy. I think words are important. They express your meaning and if you are shortening everything i feel as though the meaning gets lost in translation. I have been trying to come up with an example from when I was younger of a made up word but I really can't think of any. I am sure there were since those were the days when AIM was huge, myspace invented and then facebook. I guess the best example would be people using AIM "talk" in normal conversations such as lol or ttyl. But I feel like those even though annoying when used in verbal communication are not as bad as "totes." Maybe I am thinking to hard about this or maybe i have just found a pet peeve. I just feel as though some of these "new" words kids are creating you cant even understand what the real word is anymore. Its like a whole new language.

Blow dried, Blew dried, blowed dry, blew dry, So which is it?

So as I sat in class and was looking at a list of pet peeves, the whole list got me thinking. How do you really say that you have dried your hair past tense with the word blow. Is it 'blow dried', 'blew dried', 'blowed dry', or 'blew dry'? I know I am not the only one who has had conversations that you are about to say "I blow dried my hair" you stop and say it three times trying to figure out which one is the correct way to say it. Then there is that moment where everyone your talking to is trying to figure it out too and it ends up with the result of everyone saying "well we know what you mean" or "we know what your trying to say". So how are we supposed to figure this out? Does it not matter because the meaning still gets across? Or does the choice of how you say it change based on the context? Are both past tense or is just one of the words turn into past tense form? I personally have no clue whats so ever and forgot how annoyed I am about not knowing this until after class. 

Lets take a look at these two sentences: 
"I blow dried my hair."
"I blew dried my hair."

Both sound as though they could work, but blow dried sounds better. But then lets take a look at these two options:
"I blowed dry my hair."
"I blew dry my hair."

I think both of those sound correct as well and you know it was in the past and that the action was blowing your hair dry. So looking at these sentences what can you deduct? Is it the action of blowing that needs to be changed into past tense or is the drying that needs to be past tense? I personally think that if you choose to keep blow as blow then it should be dry that changes to dried, but if you choose to change blow to blew then dry should stay as dry. 

I am only trying to understand how to phrase this with just the words blow and dry because there are other ways of saying this such as "I've blown dry my hair" but I may very well be confusing myself even more on the matter or confusing those who were once confident on how to say this statement and for that I apologize. Thoughts are more than welcome on the subject!