Am I Speaking English?: Just for laughs 

The nineteen eighties fondness for acronyms was perhaps a characteristic reflection of the computer lingo of the decade. What with `byte’ taking more than a mouthful of your everyday banter. Needless lengthy one-liners were cut to size and became snappy four-letter words that people exchanged over dining tables or heard over communications systems. 

The fondness for the pithy persisted throughout the decade. `Yuppie’ became synonymous with a fashionable young middle-class person with a well-paid job, and a whole generation of up-and-coming identified with it. Not to be outdone came the `Woopies’ (well-off older people), who were vociferous in asserting “old, so what?”. 

Market research also came up with acronyms such as `DINKS’ (double-income no kids), `OTNM’ (over thirty never married) and `Nimby’. The latter reflecting the selfishness of an age when mass media should have made us more empathetic to the problems of the day. 

 “Not In My Backyard”, was the resolute denial of people of well-to-do neighbourhoods to community needs for locating drug rehabilitation centres, shelters for the homeless, garbage dumps, prisons, highways and the like. However, the most feared legacy of the eighties was AIDS (Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome), that is still taking an innumerable toll of lives in this century. 

While language takes short-cuts and becomes crisper. It’s time we ask ourselves: “AISE (Am I speaking English)?”.