Abbreviations are nothing new. They’re found in Ancient Greek, Latin and medieval writings. According to the New York Times, the earliest known abbreviation in printed English is from an 1844 article: SPQR, for the Latin Senatus Populusque Romanus (The Senate and the People of Rome). This quasi-initialism appeared in The Christian’s Monthly Magazine and Universal Review that could have called itself the CMMUR.
What got me thinking about abbreviations was the announcement this week from The Merriam-Webster English Dictionary that they have added 690 new words since the start of the year. I haven’t read through the full list – I do have a life. From those I have seen, a large number are initialisms and acronyms, which MWED (sorry, couldn’t resist) lump together under the label ‘abbreviations.’ Okay, I’ll play along.
Quite a few of these abbreviations have their likely origins in text messaging (SMS- it’s inescapable) and social media, where speed is of the essence and character numbers are sometimes restricted. A few examples with MWED’s definitions:
ngl abbreviation, informal not gonna lie; not going to lie.
TFW abbreviation, informal that feeling when – used especially on social media or in text messages to introduce a relatable scenario or an image that evokes a specific feeling.
TTYL abbreviation, informal talk to you later.
I’m assuming some of these are lower case while others are uppercase because that’s how they’re being used. Seeing the MWED using gonna is novel and destroys my writing teacher’s mantra about not writing exactly how you speak.
Then there’s GOATED – apparently all caps. It started its slang life as GOAT – the greatest of all time. I’ve seen this pop up on social media, which tells me it’s not just a young person’s expression given the grown-ups I follow online. The word has now acquired an adjective form to denote ‘something or someone who is considered to be the greatest of all time.’ Though linguistically interesting, I find this rather cringeworthy, reminding me of the hyperbolic language spouted by populists.
Other abbreviations on the new word list come from official channels, such as the US government, who have replaced UFOs with UAPs. Here’s MWED’s wordy definition:
unidentified aerial phenomenon (a mysterious flying object in the sky that is sometimes assumed to be a spaceship from another planet); also: unidentified anomalous phenomenon (a mysterious phenomenon, especially an unidentified aerial phenomenon, that is sometimes assumed to be a spaceship from another planet).
I suspect this is an exercise in rebranding, intended to give an air of legitimacy to government-led investigations into what I still call UFOs.
Once again, the addition of words to our dictionaries reflects the age we live in. More on this topic later, I’m sure.
Paola Trimarco 