Sense and Sensibility

Let us do a quick exercise. Pull out your mobile phone, go to your text window and type out the letter ‘O’. That’s right, just that one letter. How many seconds did that take? One full second or perhaps a split second? Now let’s imagine we need to type a simple reply like ‘Ok’ 20 times a day. If typing the full ‘Ok’ takes two seconds, then by doing away with the first letter, we’ve saved 10 whole seconds in a day. As far as optimisation of time goes, that’s really as thinly sliced as slicing can be. Therefore, one keeps receiving the reply ‘K’ from all quarters, every day - millennials, Generation X that is very with the times, friends, colleagues, ‘Uber’ drivers, delivery persons et al.

But if the objective was to save time, why do we then go and spend inane hours scrolling through ‘Instagram’ reels or participating in meaningless banter on ‘WhatsApp’ groups? It makes little sense. Here we’ve gone and split an already diminished word such as ‘Ok’ to save nanoseconds and then we go and spend it on pointless screen time?

So clearly, sending a reply that reads ‘K’ for okay, can’t be an exercise in saving time. So then how did a short enough word like ‘Okay’, which has already been abbreviated to ‘Ok’, get further sliced to ‘K’?

It isn’t just ‘K’. The list of abbreviations in everyday use is getting longer and try as one might, one often fails to keep up with it. There’s ‘Lol’ for a loud laugh, ‘OMG’ for expressing amazement, ‘ETA’ for letting someone know your time of arrival, ‘Brb’ for taking a break and so on and so forth. There are abbreviations such as ‘FOMO’ and ‘YOLO’, that are now completely par for the course. It was only a few months ago that I figured out what ‘OG’ meant. Short for ‘Original Gangster’, being called ‘OG’ was actually a good thing! Being called a gangster, albeit abbreviatedly was a millennial’s way of according respect and giving you a high compliment!

One of the longest and hardest English words an entire generation toyed with, even though the sound of it was quite atrocious was - you’ve guessed it right - ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’! Some could get it right, some struggled with it, but everyone had fun with the extraordinary length, cadence and complexity of that word after Mary Poppins used it in a song. And true to the song, it sounded quite precocious if one said it loud enough!

It isn’t that good vocabulary has been entirely dumped. Look at the runaway success of Tharoor and his ‘Tharoor-isms’ that are lapped up everywhere from memes and forwards to more serious, live discussions. But Tharoor aside, expression and enunciation seem to have lost favour and are increasingly getting replaced by a whole new lingo of a bunch of letters that get stitched together to convey it all. And of course, if abbreviations too fall short, (pun intended) in conveying the required response, there’s always an emoji to choose from. Different coloured hearts to convey different levels and shades of affection, a whole bouquet of flowers to pluck from and the ever-dependable thumbs up, the emoji that has made language almost redundant.

Language took millenniums to evolve from mere cave art and grunts that could convey only basic needs and emotions to a highly evolved, complex dimension, unique to homo sapiens who turned it into a delightful art form, birthing literature and poetry that could convey even the most nuanced expression succinctly and magically. Are we then starting to come full circle when we choose to dispense with fully formed sentences or punctuation, sanguine in the fact that a smattering of letters or an emoji has conveyed us sufficiently? Are we ‘K’ with that?

Supriya Newar is a Kolkata-based writer, poet, music aficionado and communications consultant. She may be reached at [email protected], Instagram: @supriyanewar, Facebook: supriya.newar and LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/supriya-newar