This Girl

I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it. --Rihanna We sat in our seats waiting for the second half to start. With the score tied, the fans were hopeful that our team would come out fighting and put this one away.  The stands were abuzz with folks making the obligatory concessions and pitstop runs, standing up to stretch and nodding mindlessly to the half-time family-friendly events taking place on the field. At the 50-yard line, a group preteen girls danced to a catchy little tune. Their parents dressed the future Bey-Beys modestly and didn't over-do the makeup. How refreshing it was to see girls dressing and looking their age, rather than 10-going-on-30. Finally, I thought, people are getting it. That's when my husband pointed out that the catchy little tune to which they were dancing was none other than Rihanna's S&M.  And the WTF moment quickly descended upon yours truly.

Social media has done it again.  From the ambiguous and uninterpretable meaning of likes to the destruction of civilized language though an overpopulation of 3-4 letter acronyms, punctuation marks and emoticons, we have run the gamut of sorry excuses for words. Or so I thought. Allow me to introduce you, dear reader, to the Facebook Sticker. What is a sticker you might ask? It is a quick and dirty mechanism to scare the crap out of the BFF who is on the receiving end of your impersonal, remote, online dialogue, that's what.  Let me illustrate by defining these new "you can't see me so I am going to try to tell you how I am feeling through creepy cartoonish faces" word stand-ins. Enjoy. Or not.

Dear young people sitting at the table next to me who are obviously on a date, Put those stupid iPhones away and pay attention to each other. We've all done it. Admit it. We've all been smartphone douche bags. It's a cultural change that might not have been welcome or anticipated. But it is here. Smartphone douchery is as commonplace as highs of 67 in June in Chicago. Wait...what? Nevermind. Anywho, I was out for a casual dinner at a pub with the hubby the other night and next to us--as in, not quite a foot away due to European style table crampery--was a young couple who appeared to be on a date. I don't know, maybe they were bro-and-sis and were playing a blinking game. But the short-lived longing stares said one thing--either fireworks were about to hit or there's going to be a heartache tonight.

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. is an acronym. --as posted on Urban Dictionary Scientists are a curious bunch--and I'm not just talking about our yearning for answers. We tend to use big words like pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis , which basically means something icky is junking up your lungs. Actually, I had never seen that word until about 24 seconds ago when I googled "big science words." But still, we use big words and because we like to pat ourselves on the back for being so busy saving the human race, the planet, the universe and cute puppies from total destruction, we don't have a lot of time to waste using those big words. Solution? Acronyms.

Insanity laughs, under pressure we're cracking Can't we give ourselves one more chance --Under Pressure Queen, David Bowie I got my first taste of the news when I was a young sap, watching the great Walter Jacobson with my Dad. It was pretty much an evening ritual--newspaper, Wally, and maybe a little Dan Rather. Somewhere in there, Dad managed to eat dinner. I just can't remember the order of events. What I do remember is that this pretty much sums it up. There was no gluing of eyes to the tube watching talking head after talking head report the same exact story over and over, but with a different touch of flair. There was no getting up early in the morning to share your coffee with two spiffy gents and the token female who should really rethink the amount of time she spends in tanning beds. Reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter or repeating what the producer says in your earpiece is hardly what I would call "analysis," but somehow it passes as

BREAKING: ENTERTAINMENT NEWS: Reality TV power house, Bravo announced today that it will be addressing Punctuation Mark Addiction in a new series, Breaking  Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad Habits!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The idea for the show was pitched by the Collective Union of Simple Messages, or CUOSM, after a campaign to fight message loss through punctuation mark abuse failed miserably. CUOSM teamed up with the informal organization the Punctuators to stall what appeared to be unsustainable punctuation overpopulation. The message had an anticlimactic effect, though, when social media users started sharing the memes originating from the campaign, while adding comments like "So True!!!!!" and "IKR?????!!"