It is with a mixture of sadness and reluctance that I have been forced to accept that I am officially 'old', given that my young boss has now taken to communicating in text speak. I have come to accept that modern communication methods are not necessarily the option I would have chosen, but one tries to go with the flow.
I have grown to accept 2 page emails on issues that could have been resolved with a 30 second phone call, endure lengthy chats about nothing in particular (certainly not work related) with people I have never met or am ever likely to.
I have learned to embrace the crude idioms of modern management that loosely translated equate to not having a clue what anyone is talking about. I have 'sent ideas up the flagpole', 'kicked dreams into the long grass', 'brassed off a few pencil jockeys', 'rolled with the big cheese', 'polished the odd turkey', 'got plenty of bang for my bucks' and 'given the bean-counters some creative wriggle room'.
Much of my youth was acquainting myself with the Queen's English – the grammar, the spelling, the meaning, the phrasing and the punctuation. To the best of my knowledge it is still part of the school curriculum, though now only as an elective, behind the likes of Gaelic and Urdu.
I am not a card carrying Royalist (OK I may be able to dig out a Silver Jubilee mug from the loft if you forced me to spend a weekend in purgatory – and I did once drive around with the Charles and Diana dolls on my back seat; the one's with the waggling ears). Quite why “Queenie” should be taking the credit for a language that has existed for centuries evades me but it seems to have served me pretty well all these years.
Working in the IT industry, which only ranks behind the US military in the preponderance of acronyms you quickly come to expect that reading a letter or e-mail will take 3 times longer than necessary, simply in view of the amount of time required to unscramble the jargon.
It is bad enough that I have to learn new acronyms all the time since the industry is constantly coming up with new technologies. Now I am expected to know what the following means @TEOTD (at the end of the day), CID (consider it done), DHYB (don't hold your breath), FTR (for the record), KMP (keep me posted), HADVD (have advised), J/C (just checking), TXS (thanks). The other day I was called an ACORN, which I later learned to be ‘a completely obsessive really nutty person’.
It took a while for the penny to drop, believing it was a tick in my manager’s fingers that was causing him to type the letter ‘J’ at the end of certain sentences. This I later learned indicated a joke. ‘LOL’ similarly appeared in unusual places. Historically I have always understood this to mean ‘Lots of Love’ and I wasn’t sure that I was ready for this type of relationship with a co-worker. Thankfully my concerns were not realised since it was pointed out that the implied meaning was ‘Laugh out loud’.
I have nothing against the use of abbreviations, ‘etc.’, ‘Dept.’, ‘Mgmt.’, ‘Mr.’ have been accepted for generations; the full stop at the end of the word indicating that the word has been abbreviated. Why should I now have to read items about ‘guvmint’ when there is a perfectly acceptable abbreviation of ‘govt.’? ‘Kewl’ should not be seen as a mark of how ‘cool’ a person is, it is an indication that the sender is dyslexic.
Of course there has been instances where text speak has managed to find a way into everyday usage. Most people understand ‘OTT’ to mean ‘over the top’, 'RIP' - 'Rest in Peace' and ‘BMX’ – a leather clad, helmeted lunatic on a bicycle. Even I know that ‘F1GP’ means ‘Formula One Grand Prix’ even if it is the only thing I know about that sport. There was a time when if a shopkeeper had uttered the word ‘BOGOF’, the natural reaction would have been to snarl back some similarly offensive retort. Nowadays most customers would comprehend that this as a reference to a ‘Buy one get one free’ offer.
The advertising industry have been using their own language for decades. Thanks to them we have KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), the PS2 (Play Station Two), FCUK (French Connection United Kingdom) and TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday). A Joseph Cyril Bamford excavator doesn’t conjure up quite same image as a JCB, and would B & Q have become quite such a household name if it had remained Block and Quayle? Acronyms and abbreviations are not always the driving force behind the shorthand, some of the origins can be more obscure. IKEA was formed in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad. The ‘E’ taken from Elmtaryd, the farm where he grew up and the ‘A’ from Agunnaryd, his home parish in Southern Sweden.
Additions to the advertisers armoury of buzz words, such as ‘strength’, ‘guard’, ‘soft’, ‘gentle’, ‘tasty’ and ‘natural’, taken from text speak are ‘NG’ – ‘Next Generation’ , and anything with an ‘eco’, ‘pro’, ‘bio’, ‘X’ or arbitrary number tagged on either the front or the back.
It seems that everywhere you look the world is being infiltrated by shortcuts. Even road signs are being reduced to abbreviations. Tourist signs now read ‘chyd’ for ‘Churchyard’ and ‘Mus’ for ‘Museum’. Is there a global shortage of paint that no one is letting on?
Last month I was happily driving through the countryside trying to translate the cryptic clues on the road signs that I passed. I had almost reached Pen y Fan before I realised that I had ventured into the colonies and that the bottom half of the signs were written in Welsh.
I have read of occasions when exam papers have been submitted by students written entirely in text speak, and accepted by the examining body – The articles did not say how long it took for the examiners to mark the paper, or whether the students passed the exam.
Maybe it is part of my Vulcan heritage but creating a shorthand for a word or phrase that takes considerably longer to decypher than it would take to write in full is both counter-productive and illogical. I for one shall remain as conscientious as ever and honour the dignity of the longhand Anglo-Saxon that I was taught to both read and write.
