My chief learning of 2010 has been stuff like ROFLMAO. Rolling on the floor laughing my a** off
My chief learning of 2010 has been stuff like ROFLMAO. Rolling on the floor laughing my a** off.
When I first started encountering it on Twitter, I suspected it to be some sort of a cat sound uttered for sexual effect. Only when I found perfectly straight men I know hurling it at me, did I bother to Google it.
It is a pity that when Celina Jaitly adds "ROFLMAO" to her tweets these days, it does not have the same effect on me. But then, that is the price of knowledge.
I knew "significant other", but when people mentioned SO, my auto-response system as a journalist registered it as something akin to SHO, the station house officer of a police station. In that I was not much off
the mark.
Or that IMHO is not an international monetary body but "in my honest opinion".
No other person added to any language more than Shakespeare did to English, says Bill Bryson in his book, The Mother Tongue.
He coined about 2,000 words and countless phrases like 'in the mind's eye', 'bag and baggage', 'flesh and blood', 'foul play', 'the sound and the fury', 'cold comfort', 'the milk of human kindness' and 'remembrance of
things past'.
Twitter and Facebook might give him competition.
The English language, Bryson says, "has a commendable tendency towards conciseness". Remember 'light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation'? It has been, for a few decades now, known as laser.
By that argument, some words and acronyms used on Twitter or Facebook have serious potential to enter the Oxford dictionary with the proud gait of Messi entering Camp Nou from the dressing room tunnel.
Take FOAD, for instance. Rhymes with the coldly violent 'load', but loaded with far louder drama: '**** off
and die.'
Or HAND for 'have a nice day'.
Acronyms like FAQ (frequently asked questions), ASAP (as soon as possible) and pic (picture) have almost got green cards in the citizenry of English words, but JOOC (just out of curiosity) and PITA (pain in the a**) could very well earn wildcard entries.
If I go to sleep today and wake up five years later, I might have many more people telling me "sup" (so what's up), "soz" (sorry) and "aight" (are you all right).
My guess is, English will keep adding such words at giddy pace, simply because a society like Twitter is currently expanding at 3,00,000 users and 55 million tweets a day. It is also becoming more open, trusted.
While just 31 per cent Twitter users provided their bio with their names last year, this year the figure has gone up to 69 per cent, according to Toronto-based media analytics company Sysomos. This year, 77 per cent tweeted with their location compared to 43 per cent last year. More and more first-generation English speakers, non-English English users, youngsters impatient with length of words and phrases are joining every day.
And so, English is fast-changing around us. As it should. As it always has. Its greatest strength has been to allow itself to be abused, raped, pillaged, dragged over dirt and kitchen fires, smudged by the sweat at factories and mines... instead of being a butterfly in a bell jar.
Today, internet is byting and nibbling it down to size. Words are mating, producing newer words. Great languages have great sex lives. They are promiscuous, dirty, fertile. So is English. Purists be damned.
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Abhijit Majumder is Executive Editor, Mid Day. Reach him at abhijit.majumder@mid-day.com
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