The Poem: The History Of The Acronym

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In 2007, AT&T ran a commercial that would soon become viral due to its tongue-in-cheek representation of teenagers speaking “shorthand”. The commercial starts with a mother upset at her daughter for her excessive texting. The commercial gained popularity for its tagline, which appears after the mother asks, “Who have you been texting fifty times a day?” to which the daughter replies, “IDK my BFF Jill.” AT&T’s caricature of the 2007 preteen was closer to the truth than they would have thought. In today’s society, acronyms such as “LOL”, “OMG”, “IDK”, and “WTF” have breached the English language and are used commonly in every day conversation. How have the acronyms used in texting made an established presence in the English language? I plan to look at the origins of these acronyms and discover the transition from coded language to common use.

The History of the Acronym

The history of acronyms begins with the turn of the millennium. The earliest recorded acronyms were crafted by Hebrews and Romans, choosing to write abbreviations to save both time and space in their writings. In an article published by the American …show more content…

It would still take years before SMS could be introduced to the public market due to the fact that phones didn’t have keyboards at the time. The first system of typing on the phone, called the Multi-tap system, was used with the number pad but was still too inefficient to be accepted by the average cell phone user. In fact, in 1995, the average user was sending 0.4 SMS messages a month (Crystal 3). Texting took a while to catch on. Even after five years of use, the average user was still only sending 35 messages a month. With the development of full QWERTY keyboards and structured plans by providers, texting began to gain traction. The growth of the use of texting is astounding. David Crystal, in his paper Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, records the

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