tmtc

If you wait long enough, it seems that almost every fad, no matter how odd or dubious its aesthetic value, eventually makes a reappearance. Bellbottoms came back and so has stringing together long chains of initial letters.

In certain newspapers in the 1830s and 40s, it was very much the fashion to sprinkle stories with acronyms* such as GTDHD (give the devil his due), RTBS (remains to be seen) and SP (small potatoes). Sometimes, for added humoristic effect, the terms abbreviated pseudo-uneducated misspellings, like KY for "know yuse," meaning "no use." In fact, the most widely accepted derivation of OK is that it originally stood for "oll korrect," an intentionally incorrect spelling of "all correct."

Obviously, this trend has returned with a vengeance, surfacing on the web everywhere, with expressions like ROFLMAO, NAK, IOIYAR, STFU. Probably this shorthand served the same function in 19th century as it does today, acting as a kind of in-joke, cementing a sense of being a group with a shared set of references. The vocabulary acts as a shibboleth in something very close to the term’s original sense, when the Gileadites used “shibboleth” as a password, because their enemies, the Ephraimites, didn't know how to pronounce “sh.”




*Technically, an acronym is a word formed from initial letters (NATO, laser). Since in these abbreviations the letters are (I think) pronounced individually, they don’t exactly qualify as acronyms. But close enough.