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Once, long ago, in the dark ages of my youth, I studied and practiced Morse
Code and other arcane arts required to get a ham radio license. In that
context, it was common practice to use a shorthand for various words because
of the tedious and error-prone nature of keying in every blessed letter.
Some examples:
CQ = "seek you"
YL = "young lady"
XYL = "wife" [Hold the flames, please; I'm just reporting!]
plus several of the shorthand forms we see in IM-speak.
I also remember those subway ads for a form of non-Gregg shorthand that used
mangled word forms instead of squiggles: "U 2 kn rt gd...."
Point is, it's not new, and none of the earlier forms corrupted the rhetoric
of the folks who used them. Yes, language changes. I still hate the use of
"transition" as a verb, but I expect it will eventually become accepted.
Yuck! But that's the way it goes. Unless you're a super-fast typist, you'll
likely use these shortcuts anyway - first in a context in which you can
expect your audience will understand them, and then in a broader context.
Some will die, some will live... probably longer than we will. So it goes.
Tech writing tie in:
In the networking business, we use a lot of acronmyms. This is an accepted
shorthand. But try asking non-specialists and then non-writers about the
meaning of the acronym/initialism "ATM", and you'll get at least three
different answers. It all comes back to the basic tech writing dictum, "Know
your audience."
Marguerite
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