The advent of SMS in early 2000 spelled doom for spellings.
To be fair the existing spelling conventions in the English language are far
from perfect and laden with eccentricities. Many words are not spelled as they
are pronounced; alphabets get pronounced differently in different contexts and
of course there is this lurking 'tsunami' of silent alphabets - the most
notable being 'queue' where except 'q' the rest of the letters are silent.
In fact, the spelling convention lives up to George Bernard
Shaw's famous dig that 'fish' should be spelled as 'Ghoti'. According to
legendary playwright if you take the "gh" from "rough", the
"o" from "women" and the "ti" from
"motion" you end up with the same pronunciation as 'fish'.
However even the worst critics of spelling convention would
now cringe at the way spellings are getting mutilated and phrases are being
ground and powdered to mere 3-4 letter acronyms during instant messaging. And
Wren and Martin purists must be agonizing over the thousand cuts their beloved
English is facing on a daily basis.
In the first wave it was the shortening of words as the
newly-introduced short messaging service had a 160-character limit and keying
in letters in the pre-Qwerty push-button keypads of the good old Nokia 3310 or
Samsung R220 feature phones was quite an effort.
Hence a 'where' or 'were' got shortened to 'wer', message to
'msg', 'are' to 'r', 'you' to 'u', 'see' to 'c' and even 'ok', which was
already a short for 'okay', became 'k' as users tried to pack in the maximum
bang into a their SMS buck to save on their phone bills. Back then, text
messages were charged, though the tariffs were not as high as voice calls.
Soon this SMS shorthand began evolving into a full-fledged
lingo and acquired a trajectory of its own. The practitioners stumbled upon the
idea of usage of numerals, and found they were of great utility value. So
'before' became 'b4', 'weight' lost many calories to 'w8' and 'too' and 'to'
got reduced to '2'.
Soon the popularity of this lingo spilled over to MSN and
Yahoo messengers and other chat platforms, even though they were free from the
tyranny of character limit, nor were they charged per message. The sheer
convenience of typing fewer letters was too enticing. Soon offices too joined
the bandwagon and began tapping chat platforms for seamless communications
between various departments and branches.
The next frontier of short-form lingo was reducing phrases
and sentences to acronyms. One of the early acronyms in the official chats was
GM (good morning), GN (good night), TC (take care), TY (thank you), BRB (be
right back) to inform colleagues that he/she is away from the computer and TGIF
(thank God it’s Friday) in anticipation of the much-awaited weekend. Angry bosses wanted glitches to be fixed ASAP (as soon as possible) and PFA (please find attached) became part of the email etiquette.
In personal chats one of the early acronym entrants were LOL
(laugh out loud), ROFL (rolling on the floor, laugh), as 'ha ha' or 'he he'
became passé, and BTW (by the way). Then there was a cloudburst of such
acronyms and the ingenuity to coin new ones continue unabated. Some like IMO
(in my opinion), TBH (to be honest) and FYI (for your information) have now
gained wide currency and no eyebrows are raised. Same can be said about social
media related acronyms like DP (display picture), RT (retweet) or DM (direct
message).
In business circles terms like B2B (business to business),
B2C (business to consumer) or ROI (return on investment) have now become well
entrenched in day-to-day conversations. While techies cannot do without
mouthing terms like OS (operating system), SaaS (software-as-a-service), HTML
(hypertext markup language) and XML (extensible markup language).
But some acronyms like AFAIK (as far as I know), ICYMI (in
case you missed it), YKWIM (you know what I mean), YOLO (you only live once) or
GOAT (greatest of all time) don't ring a bell unless you happen to be born
after 1995 or an Instagram freak.
The recent Covid-19 pandemic brought its own share of
acronyms. WFH (work from home), a term that only the techie class related to
became much more prevalent and acceptable. Other terms such as WFA (work from
anywhere), SFH (study from home) and PPE (personal protective equipment) too
gained traction.
Thus, the chat lingo continues to evolve and acquire weird forms. And one has to keep eyes and ears open to keep tabs - or risk falling prey to FOMO (fear of missing out).
Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes
