Are we all getting lost for words?

Dec 24 2009 Stewart Watkins, County Durham Development Company

IT’S GOOD to talk. So said an old BT advert and it’s true. Where we used to need semaphore, heliotropes, telegrams and even letters to communicate at a distance, now we can text or email or leave a voicemail.

When it comes to communicating, is it just to avoid accusations of prolixity or is it the influence of text and email that so often makes us want to keep it short?

We’ve got slang, professional jargon and OMG; where would we be without the TLA?

I suppose flying really got us used to the three-letter acronym. Funnily enough the destination codes were set by IATA, a fine example of what the Jargon File would describe as an ETLA.

From AAA (Anaa in French Polynesia) to ZZV (Zanesville, Ohio) we watch our luggage disappear, hoping someone recognises the difference between Aberdeen, South Dakota (ABR) and the Granite City (ABZ).

Unless, of course, we’re operating under ICAO rules where Anaa becomes NTGA, Zanesville is KZZV and Scotland’s third most populous city puzzlingly becomes EGPD.

We daily look forward to attachments in whatever format they arrive, be it PDF, JPG, GIF or TIFF.

When someone mentions RSS, we think Really Simple Syndication rather than ruminating on the 175-year history of the UK’s only professional society devoted to the interests of statistics and statisticians.

And new forms of social networking usher in their own neologisms. As Twaffic increases you might need to observe twettiquette or seek help from a tweetorial.

But in science, the TLA comes into its own as part of a specialised vocabulary. ?4U. Which would you opt for between saying polyphenylene vinylene or PPV?

Accuracy is as vital to clear communication as it is to the scientific method. In science there’s no such thing as almost the right word – if you’re willing to settle for roughly right, it’s all too easy to suddenly find you’re precisely wrong.

But @TEOTD whichever way we communicate, let’s keep talking.

Ah well, BTW! Enjoy the break and, to quote a song that first topped the charts in December 1973, Look to the future now, it’s only just begun.

Stewart Watkins is managing director of County Durham Development Company