My designer friend Nick, who designed the book of this very blog (available in all good book shops, in Bell Street, Reigate – although they may have sold it by now), was out digging weeds this week when he fell down a rabbit hole. I’m talking about a metaphorical rabbit hole. Nick is a standard size bloke and wouldn’t fit down a real rabbit hole.
The metaphorical rabbit hole that Nick fell down concerned abbreviations. It’s funny the things that come into your mind when digging weeds, and in Nick’s case the thing that came into his mind was the word ‘admin’. Soon, he thought to himself, the day will come when children grow up not realising there is a word ‘administration’.
This got Nick’s blood up a bit and led him on to think of other words that have replaced their full-length original to the extent that the original is in danger of fading out of use. Spec. Prelims. Telecoms. Comms. Op. Obvs.
One word that has resisted the abbreviation epidemic is, somewhat ironically, abbreviation. We don’t abbreviate abbreviation, do we? Abbrev sounds silly and ab is already taken by the fitness fraternity, who have these things called abdominal muscles. Not that there is any control over the duplication of abbreviations. There is no equivalent of Equity or the British Horseracing Authority, protecting their uniqueness. And this can lead to all sorts of confusion. If you want examples, just go to hospital.
In hospital they have the Obs and Gynae department, short for Obstetrics and Gynaecology. So imagine the surprise for my friend Lisa, who had to spend a couple of nights in hospital this week, when they woke her up in the middle of the night, saying they’d come to do her obs! “Hold the phone!” she wisecracked (Lisa’s a scouser), “I’m only here to have me appendix out!”
What they meant, of course, was her observations (pulse, blood pressure etc), not her obstetrics (pregnancy, childbirth etc). But it’s a cautionary tale of how abbreviations can become a minefield of misunderstanding if we’re not careful.
Meanwhile, Nick was still going with his exploration of the mindset that makes us abbreviate just about everything in the world. He put it down to being time poor. We simply don’t have time to say words in their entirety any more. We are heading towards a future of monosyllabic oblivion – Ob.
“But the final irony,” he cackled, slightly demonically I must say, “is the worldwide web. Why? Because we’ve wasted all these years saying ‘www’ when ‘worldwide web’ takes one third of the time!”
