Because Internet - Gretchen McCulloch Page 0,3

uncommon concept of an odd-toed ungulate. Similarly, if we assigned the meaning of “of” to a sequence of sounds as long as “rhinoceros,” it would be a clear drop in efficiency. In this chapter alone, the word “of” occurs over one hundred times, and making them all five times longer would be a lot rhinoceros sounds for a small amount rhinoceros meaning!

Frequency isn’t completely static: the word “rhinoceros” entered English around the fourteenth century, but as the animal became more common in the lives of English speakers, we shortened it to “rhino” by 1884. “Rhino” splits the difference. It’s not quite as short as “of,” but then again, even a zookeeper still says “of” more often. Truly obscure animals, like the axolotl (a type of salamander) or the Wunderpus photogenicus (a type of octopus which, true to its name, is very photogenic), don’t have nicknames in common use, although I expect to hear from the Association for Researchers of the Axolotl and the Wunderpus Photogenicus (ARAWP?) any day now informing me that they say them often enough that they’ve devised more efficient names for them.

Sometimes, as with “of” and “rhinoceros,” efficiency in writing and speaking amounts to basically the same thing: more letters on the page equals more sounds in the mouth. Other times, they take different paths. In speech, we often make language more efficient by dropping unnecessary syllables or squishing sounds together, even if it’s not writable. We truncate words without regard for spelling: you can say the first syllable of “usual” or “casual” and everyone knows what you mean, but do you write it “yooj”? “uzh”? “cazh”? “casj”? It’s simply not clear, but speech proceeds merrily along anyway. An even more extreme example comes in how English speakers smooth out “I do not know.” We’ve been saying it out loud for generations, long enough for it to have worn down to “I don’t know,” “I dunno,” and even a simple triplet “uh-huh-uh” or “mm-hm-mm” to the low-high-low melody of “I dunno.” “I dunno” is easier to articulate than “I do not know,” but it’s not really much shorter to write (even though we sometimes write it to evoke speech). The melodic triple hum is exceedingly easy to produce (you can even do it with a mouthful of sandwich) but not efficient at all in writing, requiring a full-on explanation. We also try to maintain a constant rate of information flow: to say predictable words more quickly and unpredictable words more slowly. One study showed that people say the word “mind” quite quickly in a sentence like “Mama, you’ve been on my mind,” where it’s very predictable thanks to a certain oft-covered Bob Dylan song, but they say it much slower in an unpredictable context, like “paid jobs degrade the mind,” one of Aristotle’s more obscure sayings. (Of course, if you’re a big Aristotle fan who’s never heard of Bob Dylan, you may find that the inverse is true for you.)

In writing, we often make language more efficient by selecting just a few important letters or squishing symbols together into a new shape, even if the resulting formations aren’t pronounceable. The types of ideas that get acronyms or abbreviations have evolved along with what sorts of things people wanted to write efficiently. The Romans found it much easier to inscribe coins and statues with SPQR than the full Senatus Populusque Romanus. Medieval scribes smooshed common words together into new symbols such as & and %. When the Renaissance brought with it an increased interest in the classics and sciences, scholars abbreviated Latin phrases like e.g. (“for example”) and ibid. (“in the same reference already cited”). But the true golden era of acronyms began surprisingly recently. The word “acronym” itself entered English only in 1940, and acronyms, especially the kind that are pronounced as a single word rather than a series of letters, began flourishing during World War II, when soldiers used acronyms like AWOL, snafu, WAAF, and radar.* After the war, acronyms just kept proliferating, especially for organizations, new discoveries, and other names: laser, NASA, NATO, AIDS, NAACP, codec, Eniac, UNESCO, UNICEF, OPEC, FIFA, NASDAQ, FDR, CD-ROM, MoMA, DNA, and so on. These forms are shorter in writing, but not necessarily more efficient in speech, even though we sometimes speak them aloud when we’re talking about specialized topics: it takes longer to say “ampersand” or “WWF” than “and” or “World Wildlife Fund.” Technical acronyms reflect writing as a formal domain, which aims to maximize efficiency on bureaucratic procedures