Shortening

People are lazy. This is probably one of the greatest truths about mankind. We are as lazy as an overweight sheepdog that's had enough Ritalin injected into it to be declared legally dead. But sometimes, it gets absolutely ridiculous. And again, this is something that's easily observed by the way we talk and write.

One word that provides ample evidence for this: "Okay". Think about it: we've taken a four letter word and decided that it just takes too damn long to say, so we shortened it down to "OK". But that wasn't enough. Typing out two whole letters might make the stupid children who used to sit in the back of the class and eat all of the crayons feel left out. So we decided to shorten it down again. Now we just type "K".  Ocassionally 95% of the time, we can't even be bothered to capitalize it. I guess reaching for the Shift key would just take too much effort.

Besides making extremely short words even shorter, we also have a tendency to take entire phrases and shorten them to the point that they're not even recognizable anymore. How about the phrase "What's up?". Forgetting for the moment that nobody seems to consider this a question anymore, and it has somehow mutated into a demented greeting for rich white boys who wear their pants somewhere around their knees to shout at each other from across the cafeteria, for that is another blog post for another day. Let's just think about how much we've squished it down in size. In full, unedited form, the sentence would be rendered "What is up?" Of course, nobody under the age of 75 has ever said it like that seriously, but I digress. So we took "What's up?" and decided that two full words were too hard to articulate, so it became "What'sup?" Then apparently we all collectively decided that Ts were for homos, so it became "Wassup?" And of course nothing is complete without unnecessary  abbreviation and apostrophes, so it is now "'Sup?" What the hell is that? It sounds like the aforementioned children who ate crayons trying to pronounce "soup". Also, you are apparently legally required to drop your voice three octaves when you say it.

And everyone's faith in the human race just dropped 50 points.