Pronunciation Puzzlement

While working as a search engine optimizer mostly means it is my job to spell things out rather than use abbreviations, I admit that I can see their usefulness. Sometimes space is tight and the room to properly spell out a word just doesn't exist. However, if anything those occasional limitations should make us want to celebrate those times when we can take as much space as we need to send a clear message and unfortunately there just aren't enough people willing to do that anymore. I make no secret of the fact that I have no patience for people who text using symbols and abbreviations. In these days of spell-check and auto-complete there is no reason you should be sending a message which requires decoding. Not only does typing 'gr8' instead of 'great' make you look like an idiot, it doesn't actually save all that much space. I could almost excuse it in people who were around at the start of texting because when you have to hit a button four times just to get a certain letter I can understand why you would want to speed things up (I said almost). However, the fact that teenagers today probably have no recollection of a time before full-keyboard cell phones and they still text like that drives me crazy.

The good news is that since I don't actually communicate with people who talk like that (go ahead, send me a text where the words are made up of symbols and see what kind of response you get), I would be alright leaving this annoying phenomenon out of sight and out of mind. Also, I'm trying to be more sympathetic because I'm sure when I was a teenager I was just as annoying to the people around me, but they didn't notice it as much since things like YouTube weren't so common and they thought it was just me, not the entire age group. The problem is some people have started to talk with these abbreviations in their everyday lives and since I can't walk around with earplugs in they are starting to force it on me. Unless every teenager in America is involved in some kind of amazingly complex piece of performance art designed to create the most annoying humans on the planet (and given the look of these two kids I'm going to say they don't have the brain power to stay in character that long), I can only come to the conclusion that they legitimately think it is acceptable to speak like this. Boy are they going to feel like idiots when people watch videos of themselves in the future (and even worse, people tape everything these days).

The other day I was in line at the bank and behind me were two kids who had just gotten out of high school for the day. They were real 'bros' - polo shirts with the collar intentionally popped (this fad died in the 80s and it really should have stayed that way) and a sideways, flat-brimmed cap covering up a mass of hair which probably took them forever to look like they hadn't tried at all. And they were talking loudly about needed to get back to school for "lax practice." Not lacrosse, "lax". How silly does that sound? I was quite tempted to turn around and put a nice curve into this kid's hat, just to ruin his day. As I said before I can understand why people may feel the need to write it that way on something like a traffic sign or a t-shirt. It's like greeting cards with X-mas instead of Christmas. However, people reading X-mas still say "Christmas." But, just like there is no reason to shorten a message written online because there is an infinite amount of space on the internet, there is no limit on the amount of noises you can make on any given day (and if it were would you really waste any time talking about lacrosse? They say it's the fastest growing sport in America, but do you know anyone who watches it after the age of 22?), so go ahead an say that extra syllable.

I admit this entire post has read like I am one step away from standing on my porch yelling at the neighbors to stay off my lawn or I'm keeping the next baseball that comes over the fence. I'm legitimately fine with it, because since I was never cool it is not like I suddenly became un-cool. The bigger issue is more from a hypocritical standpoint, because I have been guilty of shortening words occasionally. (I mean, who hasn't described a recipe you pulled off for the first time as 'delish'?) The difference is that on the rare occasions it happens I'm almost always doing it as a joke and for comedic effect, not because I actually believe people should talk that way. The only good news is that these fads have a way of eventually passing. I can only hope that just as texting have currently replaced phone calls as the preferred mode of communication, eventually we will loop around and technology will advance to the point where things like Skype become so easy and fast that it becomes the best way to communicate and people will start having all their conversations face-to-face. Hopefully when that happens someone close to these kids will have the heart to tell them to their faces just how silly they sound when they say 'lax.'