I got my first Cell phone during the first year of my Graduation and then the coolest trend was “SMS”. It sure was fun but 160 char. limit was the only problem and the solution was “Abbr.” aka abbreviation. Addiction to SMS led to its usage even in the exams, wrote ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’ and ‘n’ instead of ‘and’, and so on, but if realized, scrapped and corrected..! Phew..!
Then started YM (Yahoo Messenger), Gtalk and the trend of Chats and hence, more acronyms, like ttyl, gtg, Bfn, Gn, Sd; (Talk to you later, got to go, Bye for now, Goodnight, Sweetdreams) etc. For the trendy tech-literate, nothing was new, but for others, everything meant nothing and they would end up scratching their heads.
Formal usage of words may not be accepted graciously, but is informal usage like C U L8r inappropriate? Now to throw some light, using abbr. isn’t new, but Victorian poets were writing in this manner long before anyone dreamed of mobile devices, as per [1]
Usage of acronyms is not bad. When shortening a message for a telegraph was perfectly legal, so why take it out on SMS?
There are certain acronyms we use in day to day life and don’t realize it, like
• General Usage: ATM, FAQ, PIN etc.
• Officially Used: PS, NA, w/o, B2B, 4GL etc. and some companies just love this concept, like IBM, HSBC ;)
• Science: Laser, radar, (S, Pa, A, V, N, Wb, W), (siemens, pascal, ampere, volt, newton, weber and watt)
• History: AD, BC.
• Entertainment: LotR, RCHP and the list goes on.
• Politics: PM, CM, MPs, MLA etc.
And now that we are educated, we have one acronym in front of our names PhD, M.Phil, Dr., Prof. :)
As abbr. are used everywhere, in every field, would you still consider it wrong to use it formally as well? I know that there are certain limits to its usage, like if a Dr. would message you stating “C me 4 Ur <3 “, you sure would be mad at him. But limited usage, shortening of words OK?
PS: To add a little audio-visual effect to this: check this out.
3 comments:
I agree.. it shud be allowed to an extent... but the video was awesome :)
Nice post! Any thing which save our time without loosing any info is great, be it abbr. or phone's t9 dictionary or new google scribe...
Firstone is so in use that most time we tend to use them in our formal writings.
But we have new cutting edge tool it suggest's sentences which we are about to write, just press hotkey and see the magic... :)
My comments powered by my phone's t9. :)
Nice post and I think its true tat abb. hav become a part of writing and specially in todays generation its setting a trend in speaking too....
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