Have you run across this one? “SSEWBA” — it’s short for “someday soon everything will be acronyms.” (It may already be happening in companies you and I know!) I thank Ragan Communications (their now-defunct Grapevine e-newsletter) for sharing this news, which commented on a Chicago Tribune article about the explosion of digital shorthand:
“Resist if you will, but understand that if you do you’re going to be branded an old fogy…”
On the other hand, the article reassures those of us who care about language:
“But if you want to ensure that everyone reading what you wrote will understand it – whether it’s a two-line e-mail or a 40-page white paper, next week or five years from now – stick with standard English.”
As an aside, the always entertaining Grapevine pointed me to another entertaining blog/podcast, Grammar Girl. Check it out!
Actually, it’s been fascinating to watch the evolution of the language in a txt msg and l33t gamespeak world.
My personal favourite is zOMG
omg is, of course, short for the exclamation ‘oh my god’.
OMG is a shouting of their amazement.
From that point forward we can track the level of amazement by the number of trailing exclamation marks.
But the height and frenzy of amazement can only be expressed as zOMG!!!1
The z being a hurried finger on the way to the shift key. Likewise the final number one instead of an exclamation. That person is amazed. They are in shock and awe. So much so their fingers have no time to hit the right key, let alone backspace out mistakes.
Of course – it will likely be many years from now before we see the zOMG make its way into a quarterly reports statement or headline in the NYT.
“zOMG!!1 Mega-Corp Earnings beat the Street. ‘Pwn3d’ says CEO”
I’d heard of OMG of course, but zOMG is a new one on me! We’ll need all the current gamers and twenty-somethings to make it to CEO and CFO positions before we see the kind of quarterly report statements you suggest.
The other one from the gaming world that makes me laugh is “woot” – for those who aren’t as out there as Rob, it’s the shortened version of an expression common to players of Dungeons and Dragons, “Wow, loot!”