SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

The list of abbreviations in everyday use is getting longer

- SUPRIYA NEWAR

Let us do a quick exercise. Pull out your mobile phone, go to your text window and type out the letter ‘O’. That’s right, just that one letter. How many seconds did that take? One full second or perhaps a split second? Now let’s imagine we need to type a simple reply like ‘Ok’ 20 times a day. If typing the full ‘Ok’ takes two seconds, then by doing away with the first letter, we’ve saved 10 whole seconds in a day. As far as optimisation of time goes, that’s really as thinly sliced as slicing can be. Therefore, one keeps receiving the reply ‘K’ from all quarters, every day – millennials, Generation X that is very with the times, friends, colleagues, ‘Uber’ drivers, delivery persons et al. But if the objective was to save time, why do we then go and spend inane hours scrolling through ‘Instagram’ reels or participating in meaningless banter on ‘WhatsApp’ groups? It makes little sense. Here we’ve gone and split an already diminished word such as ‘Ok’ to save nanoseconds and then we go and spend it on pointless screen time?