A Jumbled Mess

How many parents out there feel as if their kids are speaking a different language with the new abbreviated form of computer language? The television commercial about the mother-daughter and cell phone highlights the problem and frustration.

But before we blame this generation, we should take a hard look at some of our own shortcuts. Our Federal Government is notorious for using abbreviations for everything. This was highlighted recently when a presidential commission made up of top officials from the nation’s healthcare and military complexes, filed a 118-page report. This report required an eight-page index of the 208 acronyms used and what they stand for.

The military has long favored the abbreviated format of discourse and my son who is a Marine constantly uses 3-letter abbreviations for everything related to the service.

Healthcare is not much better. So when you combine the two, expect things like CPRS, or centralized patient record system, as used by the Veterans Affairs Department, P4P meaning pay for performance, and FGLI, for those enrolled in the Family Group Life Insurance program.

In this report, you would learn that HHS (Health and Human Services) has a NCICP—a National Center for Injury Control and Prevention. You would also see that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has SNAPS, or a Special Needs Assistance Program.

One reader who reviewed the report commented it was enough to give us CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome).

So the next time you admonish your children for using the shorthand that’s commonplace on the Web and rampant in text messaging, be aware that Generation Text has nothing on the federal government.

I do admit that the abbreviations used in Government and Medicine usually follow grammatically correct standards whereas this new internet lingo rarely ascribes to the same standards.

Are we “dumbing-down” our youth?