Text messaging is big these days. Or rather, it is very small. The minuteness of our electronic communications devices and their tiny screens have turned us from a group of ham-fisted typists into thum-ba-dexterous comm wizards.
What many folks don’t realize is that the texting use of shortened words is not new. It is auld, olde, old. And there is a word for it — rebus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus).
Hamlet the entrepreneur’s famous line.
Many of the oldest written languages in the world have no characters which represent vowels. Those people just KNEW which vowel was intended by the usage context. In the times of the Pharaohs for instance, the land of the pyramids was known by characters which in English are represented as KMT (and you thought the Egyptians only wrote in picturesque hieroglyphics). Today we can only guess if this was Kemet, Kamat, Kamet, or…you get the idea.
And what, you ask, does this have to do with business? If you are going to use jargon, arcana, acronyms, techno-babble, abbreviations or rebuses in your business plan or business communications, make sure your readers know what you are txtng about…otherwise, spell it out for them.
B4N
Steve Lange
