- Image via Wikipedia
So today I read an article on the BBC’s website entitled, “How the internet is changing language”.
If you speak to anyone around the office they will tell you that I have a deep and emotional hatred of people abbreviating when they speak. By this I mean ‘obvs’ for obviously, ‘totes’ for totally and ‘defs’ for definitely.
It’s like someone smacking me repeatedly in the face with a large, incorrect, dictionary. There is just no need for it. My life, and I imagine the speaker’s life, is not going to benefit in anyway from the millisecond ‘obvs’ will save if said in replacement of ‘obviously’.
I can assure you I don’t have such a hectic and incredibly important life where those milliseconds can all be racked up so that I can spend more time discovering cures to terminal diseases or solving world hunger. To illustrate this, I spent four hours yesterday playing Batman on the Playstation, in my pants. I can safely say I have enough time on my hands to listen to the full word rather than its abbreviated backward cousin.
While the BBC article gives examples of where abbreviation has helped, or in some cases is completely necessary (take Twitter for example), this shouldn’t mean that people go about life speaking as if they only have 140 characters with which to get the message across.
I guess that is the thing that irritated me the most; there is no practical reason why people are now saying ‘actch’ instead of actually. It’s just some Paris Hiltonesque language that began with OMG and has slowly evolved into this dumbed down version of an already dumbed down language.
It’s a way of communicating that needs to be met with anger and a point blank refusal to acknowledge the sentence that contained the offending abbreviation.
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