Words by Raffaella Migliore
In the dark and bloody trenches of war, a military brat was born – the Acronym. Born out of pragmatism and brevity, this sweet kid-cousin of the abbreviation spent her early years living a useful, descriptive and sometimes medical life as ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), DORA (The British Defence of the Realm Act) and Bipp (Bismuth lodoform Paraffin Paste). This was the birth of the acronym.
As wars waged on, Acronym found her home in the mouths of short-for-time colonels and to-the-point telegraphs. The rise of new technology saw what would be her first truly transformative role as “radar” (radio detecting and ranging) – an acronym so popular today, we forget it’s one at all. During this time, she cocooned herself in the world of practicality, and focused on her transition from the caterpillar of initialism (abbreviations consisting of first letters), into the butterfly-life that is to be sounded out as a word. From A.W.O.L to AWOL, she remained a steady ally to the world at war, and in tender moments of relief, she found herself a companion of men, dressed as SWAK (sealed with a kiss)- attached to the very end of letters home, from soldiers with love.
What can only be described as the Acronyms’ equivalent of a sweet-sixteenth, in 1943 her name was coined and she was baptised into the world by the force of her own adaptability and persistence. In 1954, she debuted her role as our beloved ASAP. While skeptics predicted this young star would ride the cold-war wave into her final resting place as a has-been (with the same crash and bang as the Soviet Union) in 1991, they failed to predict that just one short year thereafter, she would meet a companion that would change her life forever.
1992 – Enter the text message (or “the decline of the English language” as a high school English teacher might call it). Love at first type – the SMS and the Acronym, a love that would grow to be one of the most controversial love affairs of the 21st century. By the same people who once perceived her as useful, the Acronym was now chastised and demonised as the work of “lazy” new-agers, and “detrimental” to the very literacy of the youths.
Despite the bad press, the SMS and the Acronym continued to grow what would eventually become the empire that is TXT language. From the revival of ASAP to the introduction of ROTFLMAO (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off), this duo changed the landscape of modern language. What was once the Acronym standing in front of the world, naked, alone and used only when necessary, became the Acronym crusading through the world, hand in hand with instant messaging, on a mission to connect the world.
Today, we find ourselves in a time where the champions of text language far outweigh the naysayers. While the more obscure forms of our lady Acronym have fallen out of popularity (have you ROTFLMAO’d recently?) others have become so ingrained in popular language they have moved right out of home and taken on a life of their own.
The “laugh out loud” of yesteryear and the lol of today are signifiers of the power of the Acronym. Lol, no longer means laughing out loud at all, it has changed and evolved. It has become nuanced with use into something much subtler than the sum of its parts, as linguist John McWhorter says, “Lol is a marker of empathy, a marker of accommodation, a pragmatic particle – a way of using language between actual people.”
So too is our beloved Acronym, greater than the sum of whatever initials she presents herself in. The Acronym, the meeting place for spoken word and written language, utility and expression, war and peace. We thank her for her service.