These days, the sharpest pencil must dull itself for the dullest mind. You would think that with technology comes growth, with growth comes sophistication. But compared to, say, two centuries ago, modern prose has carried as much eloquence as a car manual.

Readers try to transport themselves from the book pages to possibly the film projectors in their minds. I did the same in high school with a novel or a play, arriving at a three-page description of a hat, having to pause the scene in my mind until the action picked back up. It may have bored me, frustrated me, but kudos to the writer anyway for achieving such an enviable feat.

Most people would rather salivate over a horror movie than a literary novel, perhaps because thinking strains their brains like lifting does to their muscles. The more passive, the better. To put it frankly, the modern mind has atrophied. What’s worse, stupidity is celebrated over intelligence, because intelligence insults their intelligence.

Back in high school, when I would speak intelligently, the morons would jump all over me.

“Look at Benjamin, trying to sound all smart and shit. Tuh huh huh. Idiot.”

They teased me, they branded me as a nerd, as if they made me step down from the balcony of erudition to the ground floor of slang, a lose lose whenever I opened my mouth.

Was it any wonder to me that before there were films, the readers had to rely on the imagination, and had the attention span to keep up? The good old imagination, I remember that. The fellow’s hat that the writer had loaded three pages about, people nowadays would labor to come up with one word to describe. Maybe the decline all started a century ago, when along came the terse writer who seemed to slice his words and sentences into tiny portions. Easy sentences he wrote, such as, His hat was big and round, from which he never elaborated, pricked the balloon of breezy prose.

Ever hear your friend say something to the effect of this?:

“Yesterday I had, like, the most amazing pizza.”

“Oh yeah? What was so amazing?”

“It was just, like, the greatest pizza I ever had.”

“Why was it the greatest pizza you ever had?”

“Because…just trust me, you gotta go there.”

In his time, I’m sure Oscar Wilde could’ve described vividly the gooey cheese and the flaky crust, and so on. As for people today, they’ve lost the words, the right words, if any words, to express their thoughts and feelings anymore.

And so it goes that books today are slowing down with their prose for modern literacy to catch up, and at the rate they’re going, (fiction or non-fiction) they’ll be expressed no longer in words but in emojis: or the modern-day hieroglyphics. At least in the Cenozoic era, the paintings in the caves meant life or death, whereas nowadays a social media comment of a round yellow face heaving green puke articulates dislike.

Emojis and acronyms, one day, it will all be emojis and acronyms. LOL, LMAO, TL;DR (in which even Too Long, Didn’t Read is too long to be read)… Even four straight monosyllabic words people feel the need to cut to four letters. Unless I really need to use them, I avoid acronyms at all times. Out of kindness, the author shouldn’t put the acronym before the horse because the rule is to spell out the word first, the acronym second, so the bewildered reader will know what the acronym is communicating.

I once received a document called an SOP, which I was afraid to ask what the acronym stood for, having never encountered an SOP and only a document, not wanting to come across as a layperson in front of my supervisor, but also not wanting to be unaware. I had to piece it out on my own when, out of the blue, I realized it was the Standard Operating Procedure. Ah. I didn’t even need to look it up online. It sounds like the name of an operation in the Navy, like: Operation Toenail.

But there had been times when an acronym left my two eyes stumped. If it were up to me, acronyms shouldn’t extend beyond four letters. If they get to five, just write the fucking term. The NAACP is a stretch, but at least it’s easy to remember, the same with the SPCA. I had to decode LOL and LMAO on my own, and I actually had to look up FAFO. For the life of me, after sifting through piles of social media comments, after seeing trolls abuse the acronym, I didn’t get it because the comments were too incoherent for any context, too colloquial for me to put my ear to the street for its meaning. Every time I saw the acronym, I was reminded of the soccer association and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The organization had to be some sort of soccer treaty. I put the two together, FIFA and NATO, and came up with: The Federation Association Futbol Organization. Huh. Makes sense, I guess. I gave up, crawled to the Urban Dictionary, and looked it up. The answer was: Fuck Around, Find Out. Ah, okay. Well, unfortunately, I did fuck around and find out.

People as well as organizations use acronyms excessively to present themselves as too serious, too exclusive. The cool kids will get it, while all the rest will be left behind. Just imagine if Dickens or Shakespeare wrote with an affinity for acronyms. Take your favorite Dickens line and make an acronym; see it in all its splendor: IWTBOT;IWTWOT. Or Shakespeare: TBONTBTISQ. Ah, so elegant on the page.

It seems like a new acronym is invented every day. Two-letter acronyms are fine. It took me three seconds to decrypt J/K the first time. If this culture ever reaches the point of one-letter acronyms however, look out! I smell the smoke. At every opportunity, unless it’s too obvious (such as USA, which if someone doesn’t know what it stands for, then I don’t know what to tell him), I just spell the word out.

It’s about as time and effort draining, if not more, to reach the shift key with my left pinky and hold it down, while tapping the other keys with my right index than it does just to spell the fucker out, perhaps as straining as plugging a leaking hole with one finger and another hole with another finger. Not to mention, my brain and the keyboard fall out of sync, whereas they work synergistically when my hands are in the QWERTY position, my muscle memory coming naturally, the maladroit search for the right keys for an acronym, not so naturally. Yet people feel as if they belong to the secret acronym club. Unless the acronym is universally known, don’t use it. I’m tired of the acronym search. I’ll forget them ten seconds later, the five-letter ones especially. They were invented for people to remember terms or phrases more easily. If someone went ahead and wrote Fuck around, find out, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t need the acronym to refill my memory. Not to mention it must have a catchy ring, symmetrical like AAA for the American Automobile Association, which is known by anyone who’s passionate about car insurance (and believe me, there are plenty). How can they forget?

They were also invented for secrecy. Don’t let the enemy find out! If it’s random, like a shitty phone number, then I could see the reason. Think of one like XFQ (I can’t even begin to think what it would stand for). Radio stations use them, too—like WESQ, KSPT, KNLY, and so on—but it’s really (what the kids call these days) branding. Whenever I hear of branding, I think of those corny personalized license plates on a Mercedes. Rock stations such as KROQ, jazz stations such as KJAZ, I can’t knock for using acronyms out of necessity. But when the necessity isn’t necessary, I have to step in and tell them, “Hey, bucko, just spell it out.”

Let me backpedal to the questionable term of standard operating procedure and ask, what’s the standard? Why is the standard included? In the operating procedure, the standard seemed redundant to me, unless the operating procedure were unorthodox (or the Unorthodox Operating Procedure, or UOP). Not quite the prettiest acronym.

I ditched the standard and stuck with the operating procedure, seeing the two words juxtaposed and wondering what was the procedure without the operating, and what was the operating without the procedure. When a surgeon comes in to work on an open heart, what’s the name of the table the patient is lying on? The operating table. So what do they call it when they’re not calling it surgery? The board game goes by the same name: Operation. Only in SOP, operation functions as an adjective, not a noun. In a culture seemingly diseased by nominalizations, I was surprised it hadn’t been called the Standard Operation Procedure. There, the problem appears even clearer. What’s a procedure? It’s what someone has proceeded to do. He’s moving forth with the action. Hmm. Sounds pretty similar to an operation, does it not? One of the ways for people to try and sound smarter, only to fall flat on their faces, is to write redundancies, which are fraudsters, hackers, scam artists of the English prose. Right there, I just committed a redundancy. You got scammed.

I wondered if it had ever dawned on the chap who’d coined the standard operating procedure that the operating is the procedure, and the procedure is the operating. At the risk of sounding redundant, in the hopes of sounding smart, he’d used all three words. Yet no one had argued about the problem because either they’d never cared or no one had realized that the standard is unnecessary, operating unnecessary. So what does that leave me with?

Procedure.

The document handed to me was the procedure. No other words for description are necessary. No other words for now are necessary.