In 1972 the first email was sent. Soon the Internet arrived – a free global space to
share information, ideas and amusing pictures of
cats. Before then English changed through people
speaking it – but the net brought typing back
into fashion and hundreds of cases of repetitive strain injury.
Nobody had ever had to ‘download’ anything before, let alone use a ‘toolbar’ -
And the only time someone set up a ‘firewall’, it ended with a massive insurance claim and
a huge pile of charred wallpaper.
Conversations were getting shorter than the average attention span – why bother writing
a sentence when an abbreviation would do and
leave you more time to ‘blog’, ‘poke’ and
‘reboot’ when your ‘hard drive’ crashed? ‘In my humble opinion’ became ‘IMHO,
‘by the way’ became ‘BTW and ‘if we’re honest that
life-threatening accident was pretty hilarious!’ simply became ‘fail’.
Some changes even passed into spoken English. For your information people frequently
asked questions like “how can ‘LOL’ mean ‘laugh out loud’ and ‘lots of love’?
But if you’re going to complain about that then UG2BK.