Please stop mutilating words!

No sry, I cnt undrstnd wot u r tryn 2 say. b4 I tell u ppl wot im up2 u shld knw dat…😐 omg dis lingo is 2 hrd 4 me.

Hey, so if you could easily read what I wrote above, I’m not surprised. This is how most of the millenials write nowadays. As far as my understanding goes all you need to do is :

• remove some obvious vowels
• ensure it sounds at least 70% like the original word
• feel free to use numerals and letters together

This will be enough to create your own short versions of different words. Back in the early 2000s, I remember mom picking letters carefully for text messages (SMS I mean, Instant messaging was unknown then ). It all started with the purpose of trying to reduce costs. Yeah, SMS to a different country costed a lot during those days and if you exceed the character limit, it automatically gets counted as a second message. So to avoid being charged double the rate, one had to very rigorously select and trim words. Perhaps it all started from there. The primary motive was to save money. Then with better phones and the beginning of Instant Messaging, the whole worry over character limits ended abruptly. People still stuck to trimming words. It saved time yeah. 2moro is so much easier to write than tomorrow. ri8?

If convenience was the only reason it would have been fine. Sadly, it is not so. Those people who write dat instead of ‘that’ do it because that’s a fad. I have more examples to give: luv, nop,  nyc, tym; all these short forms, how many characters are they actually helping to trim out?

This is doing more damage than the one character that it helps save. After overusing these shortcuts for a long while and when we finally have to do some official paperwork that’s when the true problem begins. That is when we start doubting if we were using the actual spelling or the short form. We will get so used to the short form that the original spelling completely eludes us. I’m going to link this with the ‘illusion of truth’.

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” - Joseph Goebbels (Nazi leader)

Thus rendering us good at communication only within the virtual worlds that exist behind those glowing screens. Misuse of everyday words and the disuse of not so common words totally reduces our ability to express and communicate in the real world. Well, you can choose to disagree and say that it does nothing to our ability to speak things out and hence there is nothing much of concern here. My only reply is: Communication means different things to different people, for me I think I’m able to express more through writing than any other form. It is also obvious that texting does not involve any form of implicit communication like body language, gestures, vocal modulation, etc which is normally involved in speech.

I realized the gravity of the problem when I could not even recollect an easy enough spelling while filling out a form somewhere. That day I took the firm resolution of only texting or typing in full words. No mutilations at all. I’ve kept this streak for years now. I’ve bent the rules a bit though. I’m open to using short forms that don’t mess with the spelling but are the actual first letters of the word. eg:- DM - direct message, ttyl - talk to you later, etc. So these are fine as they don’t mess up our memory of the original words.

Here are a few other changes that I also see in the language:

• These are obvious changes. Changes that only aim at convenience. The ‘telephone’ became just ‘phone’. ‘Television’ became ‘TV’. ‘Gymnasium’ became ‘gym’.
• Then others like bro and sis for brother and sister. I think this has more to do with it becoming a fad than convenience.
• repetition of letters: heyyy mannn, whaaatttt 😳 ⇒ fad + showing surprise maybe?
• repetition of punctuation:  Really???  True!!!!! ⇒ fad + being over-expressive?  (Even I use the exclamation a lot more than needed - Here’s one good discussion on it )
• full stops no longer mean a stop - Thanks to the repetition of full stops…it means I have something more to say …that I’m still not done…it helps preserve the flow of communication apparently? …and we don’t need to write in sentences…we can just keep typing or texting…like we are actually speaking it out…fun right?

Force yourself to write in full sentences and full words. Learn to swipe and type on the phone instead of the hunt-and-peck method. Learn touch typing on a full PC keyboard. Trust me it just takes two weeks of casual practice to get there. You’ll be able to write out full words and proper sentences in much lesser time than trying to trim out letters.

Bonus Read: The illusion of truth