ON 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.
What I didn’t foresee was that the internet and mobile phones would demand both old and new literacies. Side by side on the internet and other digital media, the alphabet carries on doing exactly what it’s done for thousands of years: conveying philosophy, science, fiction, poetry, jokes, current information, opinion, instructions, memories, devotion, worship and much more. New systems of referencing have made access both easier and more widespread. Interchange between the users of different alphabets has never been greater. Alongside these traditional usages, there has grown up an unimaginably huge written conversation. Trillions of people write to each other. To do this they have incorporated aspects of their speech, aspects of older forms of humorous and jargon-like means of written language. When an earlier form of these instant written conversations was around (telegrams), it was too infrequent and expensive to affect us all. Children, students, cleaners and footballers didn’t send telegrams every day. Today they do the equivalent.
The media have different ways of presenting this: it’s awful because we are all becoming ‘sloppy’ writers; it’s wonderful because it is democratic, no one tells you how to write, no one can tick you off if you make mistakes or invent new things, it’s like an oral writing, a written speech. No, it’s awful because it means people spread ‘news’ without corroborating it, so conspiracy theories, witch-hunting, bullying and abuse proliferate. No, it’s wonderful because our machines have eyes which means that we can safeguard ourselves. No, it’s awful because Big Brother has alphabet-reading machines which means that he knows where we are, what we’re doing and, because we keep writing down what we want, love and hate, he knows what we’re thinking too. The alphabet has become a means by which our identities are read, logged and stored. But that’s wonderful, because there is so much of it, Big Brother doesn’t know what to do with it. No, that’s awful because ultimately it doesn’t matter what Big Brother does with it. All that he cares about is that we buy the whole shebang off him; the digitization of mass alphabet-use has been a means by which Big Brother has become a trillionaire.
In the midst of this, I have to remind myself that there were times when the alphabet wasn’t used for much more than inscriptions and sacred texts, legible to a tiny minority and written by even fewer.