R-Evolution

No, this is not about Earth's revolution around the sun, nor it is about the revolutions that have happened throughout the history of time, all in the name of bringing change to the prevailing sociopolitical scenarios. This is about evolution or rather reverse evolution or devolution.

It all started one day when early Homo erectus based in Africa, discovered the edge stone tools gave him in defending and hunting, which were primarily used by his ancestor Homo habillis  for cleaving and tearing meat off  dead animals. "What a bunch of morons!! No wonder they were a staple diet for  Dinofelis and eventually became extinct.", he thought.

Now he had to convey his thoughts to his social group. There was a problem. The existing screams,grunts, howls and gestures were very basic and inadequate for such sophisticated communication. He had to come up with a new set of sounds which would communicate his thoughts to others, and then he will have to come up with another set of sounds to communicate the new sounds he has come up with to communicate his thoughts. This laid foundation to an epic saga of enhancing communication to accommodate new thoughts, ideas and feelings that spanned epochs of evolution, which evolved into the modern day spoken and written languages  with their syntax, spellings and semantics. True Story!!!

When the evolution of communication was at its peak, the language spoken or written used to strictly adhere to the spellings and semantics of sentence construction and any minor deviation was considered atrocious. At this point communication was free in the sense, nobody was charged for speaking or writing their mind, not in the form of money at least. The problem with reaching the highest peak is that, there is only one way to go, down, and so, began the evolution of tools to communicate, starting with printing press to mail to telegram to telephones that enabled man to overcome the limitation of geographical locations. Then came internet turning the world into one global village. This was the golden age for communication with all sorts of languages reaching their pinnacle and people basked in their grandeur, until the invention of mobile/cellular phones and internet chat.

While internet chat enabled the users to talk(type) with multiple online friends, it made typing whole sentences and expressing their ideas to multiple audiences a bit difficult. The ones who could type really fast got away with it but the ones who couldn't, had to resort to other ways. Soon phrases and feelings were reduced to acronyms like, "BRB" (Be Right back), LOL (Laugh Out Loud), and words have been replaced by letters that sounded similar like, "C" (See), "U" (You). Thus began the colossal slaughtering of languages by  countless hordes of chatters chatting away using various IMs and chat rooms.

 If internet chat destroyed the structure of languages, mobile phones pillaged the remains of these structures with SMS "Short Message Service" with a limit of 90 letters per message. The aim here is to communicate your ideas/emotions/thoughts within the given word limit and  to achieve this, all rules had to be broken, spellings plundered, grammar ravaged and the very fibre that built the language is torn to pieces like an angry kid tearing away anything and everything that he can lay his hands on.

People started omitting vowels, shortening words, ignoring articles, misplacing prepositions, forgetting conjunctions and interjections, and changed sentences into meaningless jumble of letters and numbers, here are some examples.

1.  R U BZ  --------------> Are you busy?

2. 2GTBT   --------------> Too good to be true

3. Itz getin l8, letz meet 2mrw ------------>It is getting late, let us meet tomorrow

Eventually ppl wl *t tlkn lke dis n fucha genr8tns wl contribute in stripping down languages  further to their bare minimums until all that will be left are weird sounds, grunts, howls, and gestures, reversing all the evolutionary changes of communication spanning multiple epochs, and sending it back to the dark ages. Well, so much for trying to improve the language for communicating your thoughts Mr. Homo Erectus!!!