Column:

OMG, abbrevs r like totes cool

By Christina Stiehl

Published Sept. 1, 2009

It all started with AOL Instant Messenger. The people at America Online even had to abbreviate the program to "aim," so we should have seen the subsequent decline of the English language coming a mile away.

With the explosion of instant messaging in the late '90s came the accompanying and extremely annoying IM lingo — a random set of abbreviations and acronyms, seemingly to make our communication easier. Laughing out loud is now "lol." (though I challenge all IM users who have typed "lol" in their lifetime to admit they were legitimately laughing out loud.) Brb means be right back, ttyl: talk to you later, and so on. Full words seem to be a thing of the past as people try to abbreviate everything they can; "to" became "2," "see" turned into "c" and the list goes on longer than I'd like to venture.

But even these abbreviations are understandable. After all, I can only imagine that typing "laughing out loud" a dozen times in one five-minute conversation would get pretty tedious. And let's be honest — we're a pretty lazy as a nation. If we have the opportunity to order our fast food from the comfort of our own car and shop online rather than walk around a mall, we'll absolutely shave the two characters off of "you" and just type "u" if it saves us time and finger-motion.

When text messaging took off, this terminology also made sense if it could save a couple cents here and there. Plus, for those of us who still don't know how to use T9, pressing the same characters on our keypads repeatedly gets pretty monotonous.

The real problem arose when, for whatever reason, people decided it was not only OK, but also cool to use these abbreviations in real life conversations. "Omg" (oh my god) and "bff" (best friend forever) were thrown around more than a football on a warm day in Greektown. Girls have seemed to take a liking to the term "obvi" instead of "obvious," and I'm ashamed to admit that some of my female friends refer to their slang as using "abbrevs" instead of "abbreviations."

Call me old-fashioned, but even at the ripe old age of 21, I find this jargon not only more confusing but also terribly obnoxious. And when I hear people use this terminology face-to-face, I can't decide whether to kick them in the shins or hand them a dictionary. Has our laziness seriously digressed us to the point of interchanging full words with abbreviations so much that we don't even notice the mix-up in our everyday speaking and writing? As evidenced in a term paper by a kid in my English 1000 class, I'm afraid so.

And the advancement of online networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are only reinforcing the problem. As people are doing all they can to say so much in as few words as possible, Facebook statuses and Tweets all too commonly become a jumbled, indecipherable mess of random characters.

As a college student double-majoring in journalism and English, I can only hope this terminology is just a phase. Unfortunately, I'm much too pessimistic and familiar with "Pars Hilton's My New BFF" to think otherwise. With generation Z kids being raised on instant messaging and cell phones, I believe our future is doomed to a world filled with "omgs" and "wtfs." And I was just getting used to "thru" and "nite." FML. William Shakespeare would be ROIHG (rolling over in his grave).