ROTFLOL

It occurred to me today, after babbling at someone about the hyper-education of the subordinate classes until his ears started to bleed, that the American general masses have gone from being overwhelmingly illiterate to taking literacy completely for granted in the space of about 150 years. (give or take--some middle class families may be able to claim their ancestors could read from the day they made their first cave drawings, but i'm pretty sure my grandparents' grandparents were lucky if they could scratch their names in the dust.) Throughout the backlog of human history the ability to read was a skill reserved for monks and the wealthy elite. It was a huge dividing factor between the empowered and the disenfranchised castes (other divisions being footwear, suntans, and the right to not grovel.) It has only been within the past few generations that anyone thought public education might be a fun idea, and only very recently (in terms of the history of modern homo sapiens) that women and minorities have gotten the opportunity as well.
And now, in spite of the novelty of these things called words, we've already gotten lazy with them. It started simply, with little acronyms such as "TTFN" and "RSVP" jotted at the ends of friendly letters and informal invitations. Sentence truncation remained infrequent, really, until the 1930's, when the Great Depression settled in. Roosevelt's numerous attempts at tackling industrial health and safety, agricultural production, unemployment, trade, social security, and sustainable energy sources after the 1929 financial collapse led to the mind-bending alphabet soup that dominates the pages of US history textbooks today. From the AAA, NIRA, TVA, and PWA all the way down to the WPA, CWA, and the CCC that hired shoeless farm boys to plant trees in the forest, FDR's nation-rebuilding projects initiated what would soon become a trend of commerical, industrial, and political initialism throughout the twentieth century. From the first broadcast of CBS news, the first sheet of MDF, the first use of SWF ISO SBM in a personal ad, to the swearing in of W, we just can't seem to be arsed anymore to make use of whole words.
The development of text messaging, however, has taken what was once merely a mild grammatical confusion into a whole new dictionary of conjoined consonants. what began innocently enough in replacing "that's funny" with "LOL" has spurned communicative code that would leave Sam Morse scratching his head. Entire paragraphs are now reduced to meaningless jumbles of letters, all punctuated with multiple exclamation points and parentheses-based facial expressions. Written communication as we know it has been reduced to the typing of pithy phrases using as few characters as possible. Maybe its just me, but i feel linguistic development has taken a step back in this regard. Indeed, perhaps several steps back. The text conversation "RUOK?" "SSDD." "OIC." has the same depth of meaning as the exchange "Grunt?" "Snort." "Humph." (as communicated by our pre-cave-dwelling ancestors the month before Urg really worked out fire.) There's only so many phrases you can spit out using sentence acronyms before your friend has to turn off the caps lock to ask "huh?" so perhaps it is an attempt to simplify mundane conversation topics down to nothing so as to leave space in the text block to actually type out more worthwhile, personal, or at the very least situation-specific information. But if we're using acronyms to take the place of social niceties and small talk...doesn't that defeat their purpose? Might as well omit them altogether. I've never gotten the hang of writing in text-message speak and don't think i want to. If something's not worth saying fully, its probably not worth saying at all.

...perhaps, given the average word count of my blog entries and the actual amount of substance I tend to mix into them, i should rethink this stance.