Use Your Words

Today’s post is brought to you by whoever decided that the “Milford” street sign in my neighborhood had suddenly graduated into something else a little sexier.

Let’s pretend MILF stands for: Masking Identifiable Letters Fashionably

It also got me thinking about how our language has become full of a bunch of words and abbreviations that almost seem like a second language in and of themselves, one that often mandates a (humorous and educational) trip to Urban Dictionary.

Because I’m an editor, I do read and write most things in AP style and have a few pet peeves when it comes to grammar and language. But the whole modern text/Twitter speak thing leaves me RME, which I recently learned is “rolling my eyes” and not just some dyslexic adaptation for “REM sleep” or a rock group. 

I know “RT” means “retweet,” but had no clue “MT” meant “modified tweet” and not “mountain time.” And although I am fully aware of the meaning assigned to “WTF,” I prefer it to mean “Where’s the food?”

Plus, I’m pretty sure people just start making up their own acronyms simply to confuse people, which makes me want to KTCOOT (kick the crap out of them.)

Now I understand that this bastardization of the language is going to happen with texts and Tweets and I’m not so old that I’ll complain about that. But just for the record, “was” is just as many letters as “wuz,” so there’s absolutely no excuse for that one.

Anyway, I am going to complain about the fact that some people have taken to using acronyms in verbal communication—as in, when talking face-to-face (IRL, for those of you confused by the verbiage.)

I’m not talking about the old school ASAP or FYI—those actually have a concrete meaning in the conversation—but rather things like LOL, ROFLMAO and OMG. In my opinion (IMO), they are just about the most ridiculous things adults can use in a conversation.

If you reply to what I said with “ROFLMAO,” I can clearly see that you are not actually rolling on the floor laughing your ass off and “BRB” is just as many syllables as “be right back.”

This epidemic has also spread into abbreviating other words that shouldn’t be abbreviated—“adorbs,” “obvs” and “addy” come to mind—as if it’s physically too much work to add on the extra syllables to say “adorable,” “obviously” and “address.”

Then there are those people who actually say ‘”hashtag,” as in “I ran into my ex— ‘Hashtag’ awkward!” This makes me immediately want to “unfollow” them so I don’t sink into the depths of language bastardization that leaves them sounding like Valley Girls…or a Target cashier. 

At any rate, I miss the days when people actually laughed out loud or completed whole sentences. Then again, if these things hadn’t crept up into our modern vernacular, a street sign with cleverly placed masking tape wouldn’t have inspired a ranting blog post.

And that, my friends, would have been totes ridic.

#rantover

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