Of course we used abbreviations and cryptic phrases. After all, who amongst us would want to be on the wrong end of a leather belt for using the term BC or MC in its full form? Oh, well, maybe not a leather belt – I am so so given to exaggeration – but certainly we would have been told by the mater to rinse our mouths with soap. Once you have tasted soap, you certainly do not want to taste it again and again.
When we grew up and had small children of our own, we went to the other extreme and instead of using cryptic letters, we started spelling out key words. Words like I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M and C-H-I-P-S and M-A-R-K-E-T and G-O-I-N-G-O-U-T. I really do not know how effective it was, because soon our three-year old brat was demanding tee oh ef ef ee ee instead of a toffee. By the age of five, she was winning all the spelling contests in school and soon my wife and I started wondering whether we had been able to fool her when we said B-E-D-R-O-O-M.
Now because of the brats of this brat of ours, my wife and I are having to relearn the use of letters and words. Naturally the brats do not have time to talk, but they can spend prodigious amounts of time typing on their small telephone screens with two thumbs. But I am all thumbs, and I reply to their text messages by painstakingly typing out replies with my index finger, using my special technique, which I call ‘seek-and-kill’ typing.
This business of texting gives rise to new problems. Even for a simple ‘How r u?’ from my granddaughter, I need an interpreter. When I deciphered the greeting (with some help), I responded in the only way I know how. I wrote. “ By the grace of God, I am well and do not have much to complain about.” The reply I got made no sense at all. After all, ROFL spells no word that I know of. When my kind interpreter expanded the ROFL to mean ‘Rolling On The Floor, Laughing’, I was more perplexed. What was there to laugh about? And I asked my granddaughter as much. The reply “OMG” also did not enlighten me.
BION, in my youth, we tended to use full words. You know, full; as in full? ‘Full’ meaning the full form of the word and with its correct spelling. We did use some abbreviations that had obscure origins in Latin or Greek and often had a period as an inseparable component. Words such as viz. etc. ai. et al. And some even had two periods viz. a.m., p.m., i.e. and e.g. There were just a handful of pop culture abbreviations. We thought that it was a cool thing to use the response ‘OK’ for a host of situations. We did not know whether OK was a shortened form of ‘All Correct’, but our teachers never allowed us to use the term in our written submissions. Except for that young lady who taught us for just one term and graciously okayed the use of OK, provided it was spelt ‘okay’. I suspect she was considered a bit of a heretic for this reason and was unceremoniously relieved of her teaching duties lest she corrupted young impressionable minds like ours.
FYI, for us LOL was always ‘Lots of Love’. We never texted CYE because there was no e-mail. If we wanted to express gratitude, we said “I thank you.” It was acceptable to shorten it to “Thank you!” The still shorter “Thanks” was a standoffish acknowledgement, when you wanted the other person to understand that while indeed he had done something nice for you, it was not such a big deal as to merit the full “Thank you”.
From such elysian heights, I have descended to murky depths where I now accept a “Tks” or even a “Tku”. I accept “U r Osum” as a compliment. I understand that “TTYL” means that my granddaughter will talk to me later. Sometimes I find it difficult to accept a mere ‘K’ as a substitute for OK, which in any case should have been written as ‘okay’ and which may or may not stand for Oll Korrect. I have compromised on spellings of words that do not contain vowels and even zany spellings such as gr8, which combine letters of the alphabet with digits, against the natural order of things as envisaged in the Bk of Gn6. I have compromised on conventional use of verbs, of sentences that have no complement and, wondrously, sometimes not even a subject! But I am yet to get used to that most cardinal of sins, of use of the transitive verbs without an object! DGMW but I do not enjoy and cannot approve.
I have also compromised on the use of punctuation marks. Oh, in our time we had them all. Not a single new punctuation mark has been invented since Wren and Martin romped around without diapers. But the manner in which the punctuation marks have come to be used (or not used) is a whole new can of worms. The asterisks and exclamation marks were never so overworked in our time. Many value-neutral punctuation marks have become emotion-loaded guns. And the innocent full stop that was used to indicate the end of a sentence or thought, is often ignored altogether. A text message with no period at the end keeps me in suspense. I am certain there is more to come. But sometimes nothing
The emojis added an altogether complex dimension to misunderstanding text messages. What appears to me to be a sad man crying is a person laughing so hard that he is in tears. The person trying to hold up the sky is saying “Whatevs” according to my granddaughter. Are the two hands seemingly folded in ‘namastey’ actually giving a high five? Confusing, no? So why use symbols and drawings that make the task of communication that much tougher?
TBF, besides TMI, there is just too much emotion conveyed by the new-fangled texting methods. Even mere acquaintances send messages with XOXO at the end, which BTW means ‘hugs and kisses’. These days, strangers blow kisses and float hearts and display cupids ever so casually. When we wrote letters, the most demonstrative phrase a man would ever put down on paper was ‘Yours affectionately’. A girl on the other hand could be excused if she ended her letter “With love”. In our letters of old, there would never ever be an X, let alone an XOXO. To a man, X meant an adult movie and, to the more discerning, XO meant a finer class of cognac. A girl rarely, but never casually, appended an X to a dear one. Even a bold girl would never put her lips to paper, leaving an ever so faint impression of a kiss, unless she wanted to convey a commitment. And it would be a stupid boy indeed who would ask her for confirmation, IYKWIM.
IMHO, by writing less we sometimes say things we never intended and sometimes we fail in saying what we want to, notwithstanding the whole lot of smileys and frownies at our command. Maybe the great gentlemen, Messrs. Nesfield, Wren and Martin, could still teach us a thing or two about spelling, grammar and writing.
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