Many years ago in the UK when the office I worked in was holding a conference with the society of authors and the publishers association, I recall we broke for a lunch break which gave us the opportunity to mingle with the attendees. I remember one particular conversation I had with our consultant statistician and, without thinking twice, I began to use acronyms and abbreviations when talking about the organisations we were working with.

Now, these abbreviations were well-known but not to everyone. Our consultant was from a much older generation. He was about 30 years older than me and he jokingly said he didn’t understand a word I said because of all the abbreviations and acronyms he wasn’t familiar with. Of course, I apologised and explained things again using the long form of the abbreviations. Strangely enough, all those acronyms and abbreviations were around long before texting, WhatsApping and using social networking sites like ‘X’, formerly known as Twitter. But those acronyms and abbreviations we used back then were legitimate short forms of the long words and names of societies and organisations.

Nowadays, however, all the acronyms and abbreviations that are used make no sense because they’ve all been made up and become common by popular use. Unless you already knew what they meant, you wouldn’t know what they meant. To be honest, they came about for one reason and one reason alone.  They began to be used because of the very early mobile phones that did not come with a QWERTY keyboard. The ‘torture’ one had to go through to send just a simple three to four-word message was excruciating because we had to press a key multiple times to get a particular letter we wished to appear on the screen.

Can you imagine how frustrating it was when one needed to send a message quickly? That’s when acronyms and abbreviations were born. It was all because of the absence of a QWERTY keyboard. But, that being said, another reason these ridiculous acronyms and abbreviations have come about is because a lot of people are getting lazy. Even when they have a perfectly functioning QWERTY keyboard now, they still persist in using weird abbreviations that likely mean very little to a lot of people. Apparently, and for some reason, it is far easier to type OMG than Oh my God?

 As time passed, things got very annoying very quickly when people began to use absurd abbreviations even in emails that they were sending from their computers that have a QWERTY keyboard. Instead of the word ‘the’ they would type,‘d’. Instead of ‘please’ they’d type ‘pls’ and instead of ‘thank you’, they’d type ‘tu’. Even the closing greeting of an email became inconsiderate where ‘kind regards’ became ‘kr’, ‘thanks’ became ‘tnx’ and ‘see you’ became ‘cu’. But there have always been well known abbreviations, long before Twitter and WhatsApp. For example, I think ASAP, for ‘as soon as possible’, has been around for a while and so too has FYI which means ‘for your information’. And ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’ have been around for decades, although they don’t sound like ‘for example’ and ‘that is’ respectively. But that’s probably because of their Latin origins.

Some acronyms are not helpful or useful at all, in the broad sense, because they mean different things to people in different departments, fields, organisations and even countries. For example, BAU has come to mean ‘business as usual’ but America’s FBI calls it the ‘Behavioural Analysis Unit’. Another abbreviation that has two different meanings is ‘OTP’. If you’ve ever used your card to make payments online, you will receive an OTP either on your registered email or your registered mobile number. This OTP is a ‘One Time Password’.

But it is also now being used to refer to a ‘One Time Payment’ which is vastly different in meaning and should never be confused. If you receive an OTP when you are making card payments online, remember that it is not a one-time payment. Another that also has a dual meaning now is B2B which always meant ‘business to business’ but now it also means ‘back to back’, presumably referring to one work meeting taking place after another without a break. And, finally, another well-known abbreviation is ‘W/C’. It literally meant ‘water closet’ which, in the old days, was a polite way of referring to a lavatory but apparently, it’s now also come to mean ‘week commencing’.

These trends are all very odd and I can tell you that I find these new-fangled acronyms and abbreviations both unnecessary and annoying. I rarely use them because I have a QWERTY keyboard both on my computer and my phone, and I like to make full use of the keyboard and my English.