Wednesday

"All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word" - Sir Winston Churchill


Alright, I’m going public: I love to abbreviate. While “totes” and “maybs” are my guilty pleasures, I‘m not afraid to improvise, rolling out brand new words before you even have time to ask Far East Movement ‘how exactly does one “get slizzered“?’ Abbreviations are my portal to a whole new social hemisphere: like Peter Parker donning his Spider Man suit, when I produce an adjective liberated of its cumbersome appendage I’m transformed from bookish law student to dynamic woman of the world.

But thanks to ambassadors like Ke$ha and Rachel Zoe, us abbreviators are not generally known for our intelligence. So as Gen Y throws up more abbreviations than Johnny Knoxville throws up wasabi-coated aliments in Jack Ass, I’m here to defend this revolutionary breed of communicator; to prove that condensing the vast spectrum of human emotion to fit the screen of an iPhone is not a tragic reduction of our powers of self-expression, but a pragmatic advancement in English expediency; to reinforce the revelation of Kyle Sanderlands, faithful devotee to the sound of his own voice, that there is no direct correlation between intelligence and sentence-length.

George Bernard Shaw might be writhing in his grave if he knew that Gen Y’s favourite pass time was the mutilation of his beloved English language. The subversive George Orwell, on the other hand, would at last be dreaming sweet. Those who denounce Gen Y’s communication revolution as a destruction - born of sheer laziness - of centuries of human progression and refinement are obviously unfamiliar with Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. Our generation is finally tearing down the barrier to precision in communication that presents itself in flowery phrases and resonant rhetoric. Our “phenoms” and “whenevs” are infusing our society with integrity, filling in the potholes in our language where politicians, Daily Telegraphs and Tracey Grimshaws alike have cunningly buried the truth beneath bewitching poetry. The minimalism of the Gen Y dialect will hail in a new era of transparency and sincerity in communication.

While there will always be purists, reveling in their sanctimonious smirks like Neoclassicists short-sightedly condemning a Van Gogh whenever they hear a “whatever” shed the oppressive weight of its last two letters so that an understated “s” may blossom in their place, most of us have sufficiently advanced to appreciate the abbreviation for the innovation that it is. Just as the French overturned the viciously-indulgent opulence of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the time will come when such conservatives will be exposed for the syllable-gluttons that they truly are, depriving the rest of society of communicational prosperity.

But in the meantime, if I am to begin using these words more flagrantly in public, I suppose it would be in my best interest to dye my hair a few shades darker and perhaps start wearing my glasses more often.

End note: In the case that my words strike a chord and we experience a forcible wave of pro-abbreviators, let me take this opportunity to thank you for your readership, for since the cumbersome phrases of this blog probably won’t make it into the new era of language, it may be my last.