Alphabetical (39 page)

A group of words play with the ‘t' sound as in ‘tittletattle', ‘tot', ‘titter', ‘tip-tap', ‘totter', ‘tatters', ‘tiptoe and ‘itty-bitty'. We say ‘ta' for thanks, and ‘ta-ta' for goodbye, and the various forms of ‘tit', ‘titty', ‘teat', ‘titty-bottle'. The song goes: ‘Tea for two'.

T
IS FOR TXTSPK

O
N THE OPENING
night of his musical,
West Side Story
, the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein received a telegram. It read:

NB460 PD=TDBB LOS ANGELES CALIF 26 1155AMP

1957 SEP 26 PM 4 33

:LEONARD BERNSTEIN

=WINTERGARDEN THEATRE=

IT WAS WORTH ALL THE DEXAMYL ITS A SMASH YOUR A SMASH AND IM THRILLED FOR YOU BLESSINGS AND LOVE=

:BETTY..

Next to ‘BETTY..' is the name ‘Bogart' written in ink. ‘Betty' is the nickname of Lauren Bacall. Dexamyl is the trade name for an ‘upper' that was much favoured in the 1950s.

By this time, people had had over a hundred years to develop a particular way of writing telegrams. The first, sent on 11 January 1838, read:
WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT
. The last message
to go out from the radio room of RMS
Titanic
before it sank forty minutes later read:

    
c/o SOS SOS CQD cqd – MGY We are sinking fast passengers being put into boats MGY

CQD means ‘All Stations: Distress'; MGY was the
Titanic
's call sign. The owner, Bruce Ismay, left the ship in a lifeboat, got himself on board the SS
Carpathia
and sent a telegram to Islefrank, New York City, which, by the time it arrived, read:

    
Deeply regret advise you
Titanic
sank this morning fifteenth after collision iceberg resulting from serious loss life further particulars later Bruce Ismay.

For the people concerned, a momentous telegram was one sent on 14 December 1941 to Miss Viola Wikoff, Brooksville, Kansas: ‘Darling not coming Moving sooner than expected dont know where. Lefty 812 AM.' ‘Lefty' was in the army; seven days earlier, Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

Quite apart from the drama in these messages, they all represent a special way of writing: much of the time they miss out the ‘a' and ‘the' that you would expect. Quite often they leave out the ‘subject' of the verb – they don't bother with ‘I'. Most of the time they are unpunctuated, don't even bother with the famous ‘stop' and they omit prepositions like ‘to' and ‘with'. The last message to leave the
Titanic
's radio room used abbreviations.

Most people who used telegrams just learned this way of writing in the same way as they learned how to speak: through custom and use. Even so, Nelson E. Ross thought that the population needed a guide. In his
How to Write Telegrams Properly
which appeared in 1928, he wrote:

    
Eliminating Small Words – At a slight sacrifice to smoothness, but with a saving in tolls which often more than compensates, small words may be eliminated from your telegram without impairing the sense.

          
The articles ‘a' and ‘the' are outstanding examples, followed closely by ‘we,' ‘I,' and ‘that.'

Mr Ross then gives some very reasonable suggestions as to how to do this, followed by:

    
A press correspondent might first write this dispatch:

‘The enemy has not yet been met or even seen on account of the entanglements thrown up during the night,' etc.

    
Revised for the cable, this dispatch might read:

‘Enemy unmet unseen account entanglements upthrown night.'

Person-to-person dictation of telegrams over the phone or radio needed phonetic clarity so that's how the alphabet acquired the ‘alpha-bravo' lingo much loved of 1960s and 70s TV cop shows. People sometimes call this a ‘phonetic alphabet' – which it isn't, or a ‘spelling alphabet', which all alphabets are, because you spell with them.

In the First World War, the Royal Navy's version ran (and I've written it out so that only proper names have capitals):

apples butter Charlie duff Edward Freedy George Harry ink Johnnie king London monkey nuts orange pudding Queenie Robert sugar Tommy uncle vinegar Willie Xerxes yellow zebra
The RAF from 1924 to 1942 used this one:

    
Ace beer Charlie Don Edward Freddie George Harry ink Johnnie king London monkey nuts orange pip queen Robert sugar toc Uncle Vic William x-ray Yorker zebra

Which is nearly a working sentence! The US version from 1941 to 1956 was:

    
Able baker Charlie dog easy fox George how item jig king love Mike Nan oboe Peter queen Roger sugar tare Uncle Victor William x-ray yoke zebra

which isn't. The RAF had adopted most of these by 1943. In 1951, the International Air Transport Association agreed on:

    
Alfa bravo coca delta echo foxtrot golf hotel India Juliet kilo Lima Metro nectar Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra tango union Victor whisky extra Yankee Zulu

This one feels the most poetic: I would like to visit the Alfa-bravo-coca Delta where you hear an echo. I don't fancy The Foxtrot Golf Hotel, but I know people who would. India Juliet Kilo has made a name for herself in art-house movies; the Lima Metro is the Peruvian government's big new infrastructure scheme; Nectar Oscar Papa is the kind of Papa we all want, and Quebec Romeo is hot. The Sierra Tango Union is a mountain dance troupe, Victor Whisky Extra is best avoided and Yankee Zulu is a good bet for a basketball team.

In different ways, telegraph and ‘spelling alphabet' messages resemble some kinds of modern textspeak. Another source of abbreviated and slang writing was in the speech and messages
passed between people in the armed forces of the First and Second World Wars:

LMF – lacking in moral fibre

MIA – missing in action

boko – a lot (from the French, ‘beaucoup')

C3 – no good, worthless

Flak (from the German, ‘Fliegerabwehrkanone'): ‘aircraft defence cannon'

PBI – poor bloody infantry

Snip – the regimental tailor

SFA – sweet Fanny Adams and/or sweet f*** all

Tic-tac – the signaller

Z-hour – the time something was due to happen . . .

There were thousands more, including initialized names for equipment, ranks, places and people.

With their short, sharp, electrically generated pulses, Morse code machines mechanized abbreviated writing: ‘SOS' was agreed on at the 1906 International Radiotelegraphic Convention in Berlin and adopted in 1908; the first ship to transmit an SOS distress call was the Cunard liner
Slavonia
on 10 June 1909.

Even the old telephone dial involved mechanizing the alphabet so that you could think you were dialling the first three letters of the name of the telephone exchange. In effect, it was a new alphabet of eight ‘supra' letters into which were encoded three sub-letters. Following the number 1, which stood alone, the next eight possible dial positions contained the letters, in order:

ABC DEF GHI JKL MNO PRS TUV WXY

If I wanted to dial my grandparents who were on the ‘Clissold' exchange, I dialled the first, the fourth and the third of these positions, to make the letters ‘CLI'. My best friend David was on the ‘Grimsdyke' exchange so I dialled positions three, six and three to make ‘GRI'. The alphabet was being used to create a numerical code. The observant amongst you will have spotted that two letters are missing: ‘Q' and ‘Z'. This prejudice against two lovely letters was presumably in order to get the neat multiple of eight for the dialling positions. By the time our keypads came along, they knew they couldn't get away with this modified literacy, so they created the same number of keypads but squeezed the ‘Q' in with the ‘PRS' and put the ‘Z' on the end of ‘WXY'. As it happens, there's still an element of literacy illusion about it, because as we tap in ‘letters', we are in fact tapping in signals that can be interpreted in a binary way – ultimately a series of number codes.

I don't remember people objecting to the fact that we shortened Clissold to ‘CLI' and Grimsdyke to ‘GRI' but shortening has been a long-standing bugbear of those who want to defend the language.

In 1712 Jonathan Swift published a ‘Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue', in which he reviled poets who used monosyllables, abbreviated words to fit them to their verses, and made sounds that ‘none but a Northern Ear could endure'. Worse, they shortened words and syllables, their taste being ‘depraved', with the result that even prose was now ‘full of those Manglings and Abbreviations'. No one took any notice of Swift and fashions for playing with the look and sound of language keep cropping up. The linguist Allen Walker Read, whose serious academic research started from a toilet graffito, spotted the presence of a fad for abbreviating colloquial
and misspelled expressions, running round the US in the 1830s (see ‘
O is for OK
'). For the Boston wags, ‘ ‘GTDHD' was ‘Give The Devil His Due', and ‘KKN' was ‘Kommit Know Nuisance' (‘commit no nuisance'). In the 1950s, the word went round the playground that signing off letters with ‘SWALK' or ‘BURMA' (‘sealed with a loving kiss' and ‘be undressed and ready, my angel') were ‘dead cert' ways to smooth the path to bliss. In the adult world, initials like ‘AGM', ‘AOB', ‘ASAP', ‘AWOL', ‘IOU', ‘RSVP' and ‘VIP' have been more or less official – in some cases – for hundreds of years.

Small ads for houses and cars for sale, and ‘lonely hearts' have long been places where people have been able to reduce scores of customary or clichéd phrases to a set of initials: ‘XDS' (‘electronic cross-axle traction control system'), ‘ONO' (‘or nearest offer'), ‘PAS' (‘power-assisted steering'); ‘SA/F, WLTM, GSOH' (‘single Asian female, would like to meet, good sense of humour').

By the time people had learned how to use chatrooms, comment threads, feedback posts and ‘social media sites' on the internet, we were ready to unleash all the compressions, elisions and abbreviations we knew already and invent thousands of new ones. Part of this informal world – where, in 2010, 6.1 trillion text messages were sent worldwide – is the proliferation of abbreviated professional-association and techno lingo. I'm not sure I ever knew what initialized phrases like ‘URL', ‘WAP', ‘ISP', ‘SMS' and ‘PDF' stood for. I just started using them as if they were words whose etymology I didn't know either. And even if I did once know what ‘LAN', ‘JPEG' and ‘HTML' stood for, I've forgotten.

I first came across digital-media speak in the mid-1990s, before texting had really taken off, and it felt at first like an English dialect I hadn't heard before. People were ‘speaking' English – and
a lot of internet chat feels as if it's being spoken – but there were all kinds of asides, jokes, and in-group sayings that I wasn't catching. In 2012, it was revealed that David Cameron thought that ‘lol' meant ‘lots of love'. Quite apart from the political significance of the message itself, it was a moment where we were reminded that we live in different text-communities which is obvious when we say things like, ‘I don't understand “legalese”', but not so obvious when the lingo is so casual and informal.

Amidst all the vast list of ‘wtf', ‘ttfn', ‘fwd', ‘imo', ‘rotflmao', ‘IH8U', ‘b4', ‘iaotb' – you use and have made up hundreds more – is one that amazed me the first time I saw it. On the BBC Radio 4 programme
Word of Mouth
, we were looking at forensic linguistics and our expert was explaining that he had to keep up with the very latest textspeak. He showed us a transcript of a text conversation and fairly frequently through the chat was ‘kmt'. He said that it means ‘kiss my teeth' but that some people write ‘smt' meaning ‘suck my teeth'.

At first glance, this is just the same as all the others but something else has happened here. The phrase ‘kiss my teeth' doesn't exist in conversations. It's something you do. (I don't, but you get what I'm saying.) A person sucks or kisses their teeth as a gesture or sign, as if I were to write ‘oer' for ‘one eyebrow raised' or ‘cmt' for ‘clearing my throat'. In case you haven't been around people kissing their teeth, it signifies contempt or irritation or both. If you're writing dialogue, you have to invent a few letters to indicate it. I've seen ‘stchuuuuup'. Because this ‘interjection' or ‘exclamation' is part of how people talk to each other, then text or chatroom conversations needed a way of signifying it at speed, so someone somewhere just applied the abbreviation rule and put down ‘kmt'.

Thirty years ago, people like me were trying to guess what
would happen to speech and language thirty years hence. I thought that, for many people, the need to write would fade away. I imagined a semi-literate society. The literate would have power and control over the machines that the non-literate used. It would be possible – perhaps even arranged deliberately – that millions of people would communicate through various kinds of instant micro-visual appliances which would mean that they wouldn't have to go through what they would see as the laborious business of putting words down on pages. Cameras, CB radio and means of recording and playback would get so cheap and lightweight that they would do the job. (‘CB' is another one of those acronyms where I had forgotten what they stood for. I just looked it up: ‘Citizen Band'. And of course the CB radio users – truck drivers in the main – invented a CB lingo or cant that was almost incomprehensible to outsiders.) The alphabet, as I saw it, was on the verge of returning to its medieval distribution, where only a tiny minority owned it, used it and ruled with it.