OMG, what’s with txt-msg talking?

Associated Press

NEW YORK

“ILY!” Susan Maushart’s 16-year-old daughter often calls out over her shoulder as she leaves the house. Sure, actual words would be better. But Mom knows not to complain.

“A mother of teenagers is pathetically grateful for an ‘I love you’ no matter what form it takes,” she says.

Then there are the various forms of “LOL” that her teens use in regular parlance — it’s become a conjugable verb by now. And of course, there’s the saltier acronym used by son Bill: “WTF, Mom?!” But before you judge, note that former VP candidate Sarah Palin just used that one in a TV interview. And CNN’s Anderson Cooper used it on his show the other night.

Acronyms have been around for years. But with the advent of text and Twitter-language, it certainly feels like we’re speaking in groups of capital letters a lot more. It’s a question that intrigues linguists and other language aficionados.

“It’s fascinating,” says Scott Kiesling, a socio-linguist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “What’s interesting to me as a linguist is figuring out which words get picked up, and why. What is it that makes OMG and WTF and LOL so useful that they spread from the written to the spoken form?”

One possibility, Kiesling proposes, is that some of these acronyms actually become a whole new thought, expressing something different than the words that form them. For example: “You wouldn’t say, ‘OMG, that person just jumped off a cliff,’” he explains. “But you’d say, ‘OMG, do you see those red pants that person is wearing?’”

Which brings us to WTF, an acronym that needs no translation. When Palin used the expression recently in a Fox News interview — twice in two sentences, actually — some pundits were a little shocked. (Palin was playing on the president’s “Win the Future” message in his State of the Union speech.)

“That’s going to be a tough one for her to come back from and explain,” remarked conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Host Joe Scarborough simply shook his head and said: “Not very presidential.”

So just how new is the use of acronyms? Did this all come from Internet speak, texting and the like? “Americans have always liked abbreviations,” says linguistics professor and author Deborah Tannen, author of several popular books on language. “That certainly predates the Internet.”

Robert Lane Greene, author of the upcoming book “You Are What You Speak” and a self-described linguistics nut, points out that in fact, acronyms date back to ancient times — the Romans and the Greeks used them. In the United States, they came into prominence in the early 20th century with the New Deal, the series of economic programs passed during the first term of Franklin D. Roosevelt — who, of course, became known by his three initials. They are widely used in the military and today’s government bureaucracy.

People who think acronyms are new may be suffering from what linguists call a “recency illusion” — the illusion that something is new merely because one has just noticed it. They may not realize, for example, that the oft-used “snafu,” in its cruder, more popular version, contains the same “F” that “WTF” does.

But one thing that does seem genuinely new, Greene says, “is that these three-letter phrases from the Internet and twitter-speak are being spoken out loud.”