OMG, NYE 2008! ROFL!
Last year on January 7th or 8th, I finally started to clean up from my New Years' Eve party. As I always do, I'd left it until there were crusty brown lime slices all over the kitchen counter, a dozen or so glasses with a quarter-inch of congealed syrup in them, and an assortment of two-liter bottles of soda so flat that when I opened them to dump them down the sink, I heard nothing--no hiss, no pop, just sucrose-scented silence. I'd gotten over my hangover a day or so before I started cleaning, which is always a good idea; no one wants to wake up feeling the way I do after an over-served night and start disposing of gin cocktails. Some people accomplish this with the sink or even a bucket, but I traditionally treat it like the eucharist at church: whatever is left over, I swill down after the ceremony is over.
I was putting the inch-full bottles of liquor back into the freezer when I began to think of what a lazy Holiday New Years' tends to be. Think about it: at Christmas, there's a mass to go to (for the religious), there are gifts to purchase (for the secular too), there are family members to see and ones to avoid by hiding in the broom closet (this one's for all of us). Independence day brings a litany of tasks with it if you're entertaining: trying not to blow yourself up with the new Weber Grill, making ham salad and ensuring there are enough ice cubes, digging out your oh-so-patriotic clothing covered in the flag (and occasionally assertions of America's superiority; nothing like a lithograph of the raising of the Colors on Iwo Jima stretched over Uncle Merle's beer gut). Even the manufactured holidays tend to expect something of us. On Valentine's Day we're expected to turn up with flowers and a saccharine card, on Easter those who celebrate have to endure an even LONGER mass than at Christmas, and don't get me started on the Hallmarks--those few holidays that have popped up in the last decade or so: "Boss' day," "Secretaries' Day," and the horrifying "Sweetest Day." To observe all of these, we dutifully hie ourselves off to the store for carnations and reverently present them to the appropriate recipient with a look in our eyes as though "it's that special time of year again." Sometimes, we even wink.
New Years' is the one Holiday (other than St. Patrick's day, in most cases) where the principal objective of the celebration seems to be to get well drunk and send off the closing year with a show of hedonism and debauchery unmatched since ancient Rome. On what other day of the year are we exhorted simply to turn up, drink champagne, yell, sing, make noise, and dance until we fall over and, occasionally, have to be resuscitated? Nothing is required of us.
Nothing, that is, except RESOLUTIONS!
I've thrown a New Years' Eve party for the last five or six years, and I invented a tradition. Every guest is invited to prepare a resolution for the coming year that involves giving up something they love, which is a transparent social comment by yours truly on the idea of trying to make drastic changes to our lifestyles overnight for no other reason than that December 31st by the Julian calendar has arrived once more. The particular comment I'm making is that I think it's stupid--a comment driven home when I read the resolutions aloud to the assembled crowd and then set them on fire. This worked better when I had a balcony; last year I had to stand outside the picture window and shout, but you get the idea.
SO...
It's with resolutions in mind that I make a suggestion: can we, for the love of whatever Invisible Man In The Sky you prefer, stop abbreviating everything? Let's all resolve this one together! It won't be hard; all we'll have to do is is think before we reduce our beautiful words to mere shadows of themselves by our laziness.
I need a soda pop. BRB.
Okay, we were talking about abbreviating things. In general, I notice this in written communication; I cannot count the number of times that, for whatever reason, someone signs off of an online chat with "GTG (either 'got to go!' or 'GET THE GUN!', depending on whether they have to go because it's lunchtime or because the zombies have broken through the front door)." Is 'goodbye!' or even 'bye' too difficult?
Another particularly irksome incidence of this behavior is the substitution of the digit '2' for the words to, too, and two (and occasionally tutu, but if you want to tell me that the ballet dancer you saw last night looked fetching in her 22, but can't be bothered to type it out, you've got more problems than I can fix). Occasionally, this makes language a complete impediment to understanding, as in the sentence: "I have 2 go 2 the store 2 get a 2be of 2thpaste because I'm going through it 2 fast." That's a hyperbolic example, sure, but saying "got 2 go" is just as lazy as "gtg" in my book.
I don't know what to do about the abbreviations for laughter (LOL, ROFL, LMAO, ROFLCOF, and IASABYLSTITYSCACISUC, which of course extrapolates out to "I am so amused by your last statement that I think you should consider a career in stand-up comedy"). These are, I fear, here to stay, and there aren't a lot of alternatives. Typing "that's funny." just sounds arch. I'll think about this and have some suggestions for you soon.
Now, I've made my peace with acronyms. I can understand that no one wants to type out "Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation" when they need a laser pointer. Hey Jim, pass me that battery-powered presentation aid which employs light amplification by stimulated--hey, what's with the finger? However, I think that that this is causing us some problems, namely: we have all FORGOTTEN WHAT THE HELL THE LETTERS STAND FOR, i.e...
No one is infected with "The HIV virus," not even the "MVP player" who gets his cash from the "ATM machine" to buy his "Scuba apparatus." Sheesh.
We should abbreviate things to make them easier to use and to talk about, not to make them go away. Let's take the extra three molecules of Adenosine Tri-Phosphate it will cost us to extrapolate things out, and I think we'll find our language much richer. Doing this will also help us choose our words more carefully. Don't you want to live in a world that reveres the fact that there exists a completely automated device that allows us to get our currency at any hour of the day or night? Shouldn't we still have a little leftover sense of awe that our species could invent a Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus to explore the deeps of the ocean? I know we're all busy, but for the love of Aforementioned Deity of Choice (ADC) isn't AIDS misunderstood enough without talking about the "Human Immunodeficiency Virus virus?"
Anyway, That's the resolution with which I think we should all begin the new year. I don't want you to give up chocolate; ADC knows I'm not going to. I don't want you to make yourself crazy trying to get to the gym nine times a week. I just want us all to enjoy and celebrate our language and our awesome powers of communication a little more.
That's all from me.
L8R.
-Entropy's Agent
