I recently saw article about the marriage of Kim Kardashian and Kenye West, and what struck me is how they described the pair: Kimye.

It’s no different than calling Jennifer Lopez J.Lo and Brad Pitt and Angolina Jolie Brangelina.

I cringe every time I see those. What’s so cool, hip and creative about combining the names of individuals? As if they can’t exist without the other? Why are not feminists screaming foul about this?

But I get off subject.

I’m not surprised. With text messaging, Twitter and other “gotta-have-it-now-I-have-no-patience-for-things-lasting-longer-than-three-minutes” culture we live in, no wonder I see so much squishing of names and phrases (such as LOL, WTF, etc, ad-nauseum).

As one who loves words, I know language evolves. We add hundreds of words to the dictionary every year. A few more recent additions being (some of which are pretty cool) per the Oxford Dictionary: Demosthenical, stagmatics and wackadoodle. Not that I know what they all mean, but they sound neat.

At least on the internet I find much of our language devolving instead of evolving. If we continue to shorten our written communication to mere acronyms, how is that different from the various grunting of our neanderthal ancestors?

I’m being harsh, I know. Slang has always been around and always will be. I can’t help but wonder, however, if all the shortening of words for the sake of time we lose what makes language complex, vibrant and just plain interesting.

I got two words of the day: Onomatopoeia (yes, I had to look up the spelling) and etymology (I didn’t have to look up that one. Yay me).