Get Shorty!

“Hey lets go to café coffee day”! I said. Pat came a reply, “No we are planning to go to CCD.” What the hell, what’s the difference, I thought. I am not the one to hold back my thoughts so I questioned using the same. “CCD is better than your café whatever!” my knowledgeable friend tells me.

Such is the impact of using short forms these days. People tend to become unaware of the actual meaning. “SMS generation!” as Anupam Kher says in Rang De Basanti about today’s youth. Indeed true! SMSes have had a very big role to play in today’s youth being so obsessed with abbreviations.

School was more puritanical in terms of English. We were strictly prohibited from using abbreviations while writing. May be that’s why I received a shock of my life in my 11th standard, when a professor told us to use “betn” as a short for “between”. And what followed hence is for all us to see.

Get the message across quickly seems to be the mantra nowadays. Why not? In this fast paced world nobody has the time. Communicating is more about making the listener understand what you have said rather than being too showy with words. Yes, an ostentatious display of vocabulary may impress a few but it could be at the cost of being misunderstood or being not understood at all.

Using simple words is the way to go and shortening them seems to be even cooler. This is especially true during instant messaging. But there also, people can inadvertently type something they would really not mean. Take for instance, a person typing the following line in the message window. “Hey, can u cum here, fast”? “No, I think I will take some time”. Perfectly innocent looking sentences, right? But, read between the lines and you can see a different picture. Just recently one of my friends asked me, “Am I that beautiful? I don’t really think I am.” I replied “BLITEOTB”. Go figure!