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 and long-winded names. The internet has acronym’d some technical terms as well, like url, jpeg, or html, but a lot of what we’re writing is informal and conversational. A new kind of social acronym has come into use, based on common conversational phrases rather than technical jargon—less BAC (blood-alcohol content) and more btw (by the way), less OBE (Order of the British Empire) and more omg (oh my god), less LAX (the airport code for Los Angeles) and more lol (originally “laughing out loud,” though now a more subtle meaning, which we’ll get to in Chapter 3). I think it’s disingenuous to follow formal tradition at the expense of regular usage in a book that’s entirely about regular usage, so I’ve made the stylistic decision to write social, internet acronyms in all-lowercase, while often keeping technical acronyms in uppercase, because people on the internet primarily reserve LOL and OMG for when they’re SHOUTING. Internet acronyms are a perfect example of the intersection between writing and informality. Their form comes from the writing side: acronyms reduce the number of letters you type, although not necessarily the number of syllables you articulate. In other words, “I dunno” is efficient in speech, whereas “idk” is efficient in writing. Their function comes from the informal side: the phrases are personal expressions of our feelings and beliefs, like “I don’t know,” “what the fuck,” “just so you know,” “as far as I know,” “in my opinion,” “today I learned,” and “that feeling when.” With technical acronyms, the long version and the short version are invented at the same time, sometimes with an eye to how the initial letters of a phrase will fit together as an acronym. Social acronyms are instead made out of phrases that are already common: a sure sign of bad internet linguistics is EIAFUP (Elaborate Invented Acronyms for Uncommon Phrases). We’re not pure efficiency maximizers, however; we also sometimes respell words when we want to make writing evoke speech, or speak acronyms when we want to make speech evoke writing. Efficiency simply points to where and why a particular abbreviation originated.