Balthazar Cohen - Totes Ridictionary

OMG! Thats Totes Ridic!

THE INTERNET:
WHERE LANGUAGE GOES TO DIE

T otes, amazeballs, adorbs, obvs. If you have an internet connection, chances are that you have at least a passing acquaintance with abbreviations such as these. And if you regularly spend time on social-networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, chances are that said abbreviations are either the bane of your life, or your second language.

If you like it, Beyonc once sagely advised, put a ring on it. Online these days, its more a case of: if you like it, put a hashtag on it, abbreviate it, retweet it, or Instagram the shit out of it. Were living through our phones and computers like never before, and, with little concern for sounding like speech-impaired halfwits, more and more of us are mixing up our typing and talking voices. (Particularly if were aged between 16 and 35 and nurse an iPhone addiction alongside a mild drinking problem.) Its obvs totes ridic, but how did it get that way?

In the beginning, it was text messages. The average texter, whether jostling for space at a bar or on a train platform, running between meetings at the office, en route to the gym, or thumbing their phone under the desk during geography class, soon learned that brevity was the name of the game. Why waste your time executing six laborious button-pressings when two could just as easily suffice?

Thus, the populations time-starved and phone-addicted or simply those for whom correct spelling had never meant a great deal began using abbreviations and acronyms of everyday words and phrases in their mobile-to-mobile communications.

There wasnt a sentence or sentiment out there that couldnt be simpler, shorter, faster. Thousands of words and expressions were nipped and tucked to order. Are you okay? became R U OK?. Great. See you later was whittled down to Gr8 C U l8r. Have a good weekend was sliced and diced until only HV a GD WKND remained. The dictionary went under technologys knife and experienced dramatic weight loss getting the bikini body it had always craved, but at what cost?

Our global dependence on email only served to quicken the disintegration of the English languages self-image, and it wasnt long before the World Wide Web often resembled little more than a churning digital whirlpool of ROFLs, LOLs, OMFGs, FFSs, FTWs, and NSFWs* one that threatened to rob punctuation-lovers and sticklers for spelling of their sanity. (*For the uninitiated: Roll On the Floor Laughing, Laugh Out Loud, Oh My Fucking God, For Fucks Sake, For The Win, and Not Safe For Work.)

By the time social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter had successfully invaded our lives used by everyone from pop stars to politicians it sometimes seemed that abbreviations and acronyms were threatening to outnumber actual words, certainly online, but all too often in reality as well. Humanity spent half its time on the internet gossiping, flirting, networking, self-promoting but computers and phones alone couldnt contain the constantly-mutating dialect theyd helped create.

Oh my god (spoken) had become OMG (written), only, several years down the line, to become oh em gee (spoken). It became, if not strictly acceptable, then certainly not unusual to hear someone deliver a deadpan lol mid-conversation. Totally originally rose to bored-sounding prominence on the lips of Californian valley girls in the 1980s; now totes, its syllabically-slimmed down modern equivalent, peppers the speech of social-network users worldwide. The boundaries between internet slang and plain old slang have blurred. The minimalist half-language of the Facebook status update can just as easily emerge from a mouth as appear on a screen.

Thanks to Twitters 140-character word limit, it soon seemed that along with a thesauruss worth of online acronyms abbreviations (or abbrevs) were here to stay. Obvs (obviously), def (definitely), jel (jealous), hilar (hilarious) people often talked in the same way they texted and tweeted. It may have been ironic, or in the spirit of self-parody, or simply because everyone else was doing it but whatevs, soon it was everywhere. In playgrounds and offices, in coffee shops and bars, on radio and television, youd be hard pressed to find someone who hadnt heard or used the defining phrase: Thats totes ridic!

So whether youre a 24/7 tweeter used to communicating solely through emoticons, or a self-confessed technophobe who thinks the English language died along with Dickens, youll find something here to amuse you, inform you, or cause you to roll your eyes in recognition. Packed with an acid-tongued glossary of key abbreviations used by Totes Ridicheads, Facebook-addicted household pets, smartphone-savvy pop art, a totes-ridic reimagining of classic films, and the Twitter conversations of history and literatures most argumentative couples, The Totes Ridctionary takes a skeptical and humorous look at the absurdities of language in the internet age.

So put the amaze in balls and prepare yourself. Its time to become fluent in Totes Ridicularity.

EVERYTHINGS ABBREVIATED