An SOS for spellings

THE way spellings are getting mutilated and phrases are being reduced to acronyms on instant messaging platforms would make Wren and Martin purists agonise over the thousand cuts their beloved English is facing daily.

The first wave saw shortening of words as the messaging service had a 160-character limit per message, which was chargeable. Secondly, keying in letters in the pre-Qwerty push-button keypads of the good old Nokia 3310 or Samsung R220 phones was quite an effort.

Hence, ‘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 form of ‘okay’, became ‘k’ as users tried to get the maximum bang for their SMS buck to save on phone bills.

Soon, this SMS shorthand began evolving into a full-fledged lingo and acquired a trajectory of its own. Practitioners also stumbled upon the utility of numerals. So, ‘before’ became ‘b4’, ‘weight’ lost many kilos to turn into ‘w8’ and ‘too’ and ‘to’ got reduced to ‘2’.

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 the character limit. The sheer convenience of typing fewer letters was too enticing.

The next frontier of short-form lingo was reducing phrases and sentences to acronyms. Among the early acronyms were 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/phone — 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, the early entrants included LOL (laugh out loud), ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing) — 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 continues 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 being raised.

But some acronyms like AFAIK (as far as I know), ICYMI (in case you missed it), YKWIM (you know what I mean) or YOLO (you only live once) don’t ring a bell unless you happen to be born after 1995 or are an Instagram freak.

Thus, the chat lingo continues to evolve and acquire weird forms. And one has to keep eyes and ears open to keep tabs on it — or risk falling prey to FOMO (fear of missing out).