Print“IDK. My BFF Jill!” As my friends and I mocked the catchy phrase from last year’s Cingular Wireless commercial, we found ourselves mimicking language that was a pretty accurate reflection of our own culture. There's “JW” (that’s “just wondering” for all you non-texting, Facebook messenger-illiterate fools). Or how about “STFU” (shut the f**k up)? Why is it that our generation uses these fragments of words so often?
I often find myself engaged in the type of meaningful conversation that only comes after doing a Lit Hum reading when suddenly my friend will use the phrase, “LOL” after mentioning the awkward sex scene between Shamhat and Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Is it that much harder to say, “Yeah, I laughed out loud”? These acronyms seem to present the nature of our culture, which is most markedly characterized by a somewhat repulsive laziness.
Growing up, I reveled in Jane Austen’s descriptive rhetoric in Pride and Prejudice. I longed for the day when my very own Mr. Darcy would leave me befuddled after using such illustrious language and intricate metaphors that I could barely understand that what he was trying to say was, “I love you.” Nowadays, however, I feel that the next best thing I can hope for is a good ol’ “ILU.” Was I too naive to believe that once I arrived at this splendid, Ivy-League institution of ours that I would replace annotations like “WTF” with “How absurd, a true travesty”?
Perhaps it's an age thing. As part of almost any school vacation, encounters with grandparents reveal experiences foreign to us but all too familiar to the days of their youth. Fittingly, my grandmother’s focus this year was her coming of age during the depression and how she had to endure five-mile hikes to her neighborhood school in Minnesota. I can only speak on behalf of myself, but my childhood trek to school consisted of little more than a walk to the corner of my front lawn to wait for the school bus.
But I think the true reason for this obsessive abbreviation comes from the influx of technology that has forced our society to react to such modernity by craving more. The more technology we have, the easier our lives should be— yet we thirst for even more in a world that is growing increasingly complex instead of becoming easier.
Take the GPS for example, an acronym for Global Positioning System. It started as a device for pinpointing different locations, but later began to be inserted in cars. While scientists and engineers (and the powers-that-be at Mac) were at it, they figured: why not put it into cell phones? And there you have it— a map and a compass, all inside a handy iPhone. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I wonder what ever happened to road trips that where men refused to ask for directions and relied only on intuition and oversized maps of the nation's interstate highways.
Some of my best stories involve being lost in the middle of the Texan plains en route to tennis tournaments in places like Tyler, Texas— the hometown of the crazy family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Never can one appreciate the true vagueness of the human explanatory power as when asking for directions. My poor mother, exasperated, would ask how to reach I-35, and would be enlightened with the following: “Ok, you go down that ol’dirt road down a-ways, then reach the other dirt road where y’all will see some off the state’s finest cattle, where y’all will see the signs for the 4M Ranch, and then y’all will keep on aimin’ down till the end of the property”.
More than just GPS, new technology shapes social interactions from Facebook and texting to the television shows we watch. These mediums often serve as venues for our generation to exhibit our modified form of speech. In the television series Gossip Girl, a show that portrays the lives of Manhattan’s Upper East Side “elite,” queen bees Serena Van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf refer to each other as “S” and “B,” nicknames now creeping into photo albums on Facebook. I often find photo tags that read “Little J and P” instead of John and Paul. Now, in addition to being lazy, we get to be unoriginal, following in the footsteps of the stars of Gossip Girl, or GG, to identify one another.
It could not always have been this way. Along with stories of the Depression, my grandmother talks about summers in Minnesota playing charades, doing crosswords for fun, and reading while nestled in her favorite oak tree. Perhaps it is possible to escape the encroachment of technology by just turning it off and making an effort to pursue simpler times. But as far as I can tell, at least while I’m at Columbia, my definition of fun will continue to include Long Island Iced Teas at Canon’s or 1020, all planned via Blackberry and iPhone. WTF?