Using full words is now ‘cringe’
Way back in the early ‘90s, Saturday Night Live had a great skit about teaching people to speak with condensed words in order to “save time.” One of the best lines comes from Phil Hartman, who plays a man on death row scheduled to die from “leath injec” (lethal injection if you need it spelled out).
Thirty years ago, this may have seemed like just a silly joke developed by the writers at SNL. In 2021, however, the practice of downsizing words is a way of life for the generation now coming of age. If something is embarrassingly bad, it is no longer cringe-worthy, it is simply “cringe.” When you want to agree with someone, you don’t take the time to say “I feel the same way,” or even “same here.” You just say “same.” Your significant other is not an old-fashioned boyfriend or girlfriend; he or she is your “bae.” I guess bae started as acronym for “before anyone else,” but it also serves as a phonetic contraction of baby.
As someone who makes a living working with words, I have deeply mixed feelings about shrinking our language. On one hand, we are taught as journalists to use as few words as possible to convey our message, and the words we do use should not be unnecessarily long or complicated. “Keep it simple” is a good motto for those of us writing for a mass audience. Still, at some point, I start to worry about how so many of our words are being whittled down in order to conform with the demands of social media.
Twitter, SnapChat and Instagram all set tight limits on what can be sent back and forth as messages. It’s right there in their names — you can either “tweet” something out, send a snappy chat or instantly relay a message via electronic telegram. Whenever you want to communicate that quickly, you can’t bother with words that have more than one syllable. Every word needs to be nipped and tucked in order to fit within a thought bubble on a screen that fits in your pocket. If at all possible, you never want the recipient of your message to have to scroll down to read more. It should all fit in a space that is roughly the size of your palm, which means no words over five letters (six at the most).
Of course, human languages are always evolving (or devolving) in various ways. The invention of radio communications nearly 100 years ago prompted the military to come up with a whole list of acronyms we still use today, like ASAP, AWOL and MIA. In general, I would say that longer words tend to have a shorter peak period than the more compact ones. Why try to spell pusillanimous when you can just call your friend a wuss? Instead of saying your cousin is loquacious, just say he talks too much.
Still, when it comes to the written word, I find it more enjoyable when you expand rather than contract your vocabulary. If today’s kids and young adults don’t bother learning those big, clumsy words in the dictionary, some of those words may be in danger of extinction. At some point, with the use of emojis — smiley faces and other simple graphics —we are going to be back in the Stone Age, writing hieroglyphics on digital cave walls.
OUT FOR A WALK
KEVIN O’BRIEN
EDITOR
