FYI

OMG, LMAO! FYI, NFT’s, IMHO, WTF? O, & BTW, THNX!

Wtf’s hpning? Are we losing our ability to say and write whole words, complete sentences? BC I’d guess texting has a lot of this shortening of popular words and phrases, but still, people… wtf?

If today’s youthful world is trying to make the rest of us feel even older and more “out of it” than we already are, then they’re succeeding… at least with me. I have little to no patience left for many of these rampant and out-of-control abbreviations. If the daily grind has gotten so hectic that we no longer have time so say what we mean, to spell something out so that everyone understands, then it must be the final proof that the American way of life has become way too fast for me. Well hell, I already knew that was true, I just found a different way to realize it.

I was testing our new printer (the fifth one, btw) yesterday, and on my word processor I wrote, “Eeny, teeny, tiny, moe.” See how that turned out just now? What I really wrote is, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” Yesterday it gave me, “Deny, menu, money, moe.” Thanks, spellcheck, but I really know what I meant to write, and it wasn’t even remotely close to what you gave me.

I swear, it’s no wonder no one can spell any more. They don’t have to. Is it any wonder that people are messing up our bank statements, our insurance claims, our drivers license renewals? Nothing is safe from human error anymore. Well, I guess it never was totally safe, but it seems like it was so much better back then. Anyway, my POV is TBA later. And ICYMI, BYOB or u’ll be SOl or DOA. IAC, LMK. & if you don’t like it, call POTUS, DOJ or the GOAT! Hm. That actually works, sort of…

Funny. This all started out as a short text to quantify and identify all these new abbreviations I see on the internet every day, hoping it would help me understand more of what I was reading. Because, believe it or not, I can occasionally get lost in all this shit of abbreviation standardization. I see it over and over again, and start skipping ahead to ‘real words’ only to realize I’d lost the thread of the intent of the writing in the first place. Then, more frustration, and “why the f— don’t they just spell it out for those of us who don’t do what they do every day, who don’t understand their work-speak?? If they’re trying to either impress or completely lose some old man on an island who might be reading their sped-up perception of things… then they’ve failed. I will understand what they’re trying to say, I will slow it down to suit my brain’s ability to perceive wtf they’ve attempted to quickly explain. They’re not going to shake me with their BS AB’s. Plz…

Oh yeah, and here’s one I saw last week on FB – “Write blog posts 10x faster using AI, without sacrificing on quality.” Oh, great. Without sacrificing on quality, eh? Still once again, showing how important it is to SAVE TIME, rather than get it right and mean what you write. I’ve shown you what AI does with an idea a few months back. Yes, it gives the same information, even makes it read as if a real person were writing it. But what’s missing here in this new AI quick-way, save-time scheme? The process! And heart!

That’s right. Remember the process, that wonderful space of time and energy spent saying something exactly the way you wanted it, exactly the way you felt it? That AI ad really offends me… it seems to be taking yet another step away from the humanization of the creative process. For centuries craftsmen (many of whom were women, of course) of all kinds knew and respected the process of their labors, knowing that time, patience and attention to detail were three of the most important ingredients to high quality. Any activity, even remotely resembling art, demands time and attention to detail. There are few, if any easy paths to quality and excellence.

Now, our need for speed has driven us to automation on so many levels. Lost in the dust of these new deadlines is quality. We have slipped, over the years, into a stew of deadline madness, where we need to release before the competition, where we need to get it done today, and that we’ll deal with the call-backs and blow-backs later. I hate it.

An example of what I hate about where we’re headed can be shown in today’s popular radio music. It’s putrid, let’s face it. And it’s our fault! The music marketing mavens of the ’80’s and ’90’s saw that the large record companies were making more money by producing and releasing simplistic, often stupid repetitious music attached to a good-looking young person who could dance far better than they could play or sing. Once again, money driving the marketing, and therefor the art. We, the public, bought it, and subsequently got fairly quickly dumbed down with a barrage of empty, meaningless and artless “hits of the day.” Our faults, our interior weaknesses always come back to money and greed. Always.

Irregardless, I could care less. It is what it is. My bad, right? Whatever.

Steve Hulse