I spent a lot of time on ICQ when I was about 12 years old - and in fact, I probably spent more time on it than I did on AOL, despite knowing that AOL was The Big Thing at the time. From the ham radio term “CQ,” or “seek you.” (Get it? “ICQ” equals “I seek you.” Clever. ICQ Meaning: An online chat program and messaging system. However, the idea that someone's answer to “A/S/L?” might not match up with the reality is still alive and well - we just call it catfishing now. These days, the acronym is more or less obsolete for a few reasons: One, we're a little more into maintaining our anonymity online and two, if we are willing to reveal how old we are or where we're located, our profiles can take care of answering that query for us. (And yet here I am, writing on the Internet as my actual self for a living.) The number of times I told people I lived in a time zone that was nowhere near my own is a little embarrassing in retrospect. However, like many kids who came of age alongside the Internet, I was also taught that regardless as to how anyone answered that question, there was never any way to know whether they were telling the truth as such, it was imperative that I never reveal anything about my actual self on the Internet, ever. Used primarily in chat rooms, the question “A/S/L?” was used to deduce a little basic information about how it was you were talking to. But hey, at least we can keep the past alive ourselves, right? 1. Why did they fall out of favor? Largely because they were pegged to technology or social conventions that are now outmoded. which, to me, defeats the whole purpose of using an acronym in the first place.Īside from the aforementioned still-common favorites, many acronyms that were ubiquitous in the '90s are rarely encountered today. Acronyms are meant to save time and improve efficiency by shortening the number of characters you have to type, but in actual speech, “BRB” and “be right back” have the same number of syllables. I'll be honest: I've never understood the point of saying an acronym out loud to another person. LOL is still widely used, for example, as are OMG, IMO, and JK - and indeed, they've gotten even more pervasive, popping up not just online, but also in text messages and sometimes even in real life. Obviously there are still a metaphorical boatload of tech-based acronyms we use today. This means that I also grew up fluent in a huge number of '90s Internet acronyms, mamy of which have now been lost to the sands of time. I've commented many times on the fondness I feel for the early Internet as someone who was born in the mid-'80s, I grew up right alongside the “Information Superhighway,” as it was frequently referred to back then.
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