Recently I received
a text message which included the initialism LOL. Thankfully I’d encountered an LOL previously
and understood the gesture :). Initialisms are of course formed from the
initial letter or letters of several words or parts of words, but which is
itself pronounced letter by letter. A good example is BBC for British
Broadcasting Corporation.
SIC means "Latin sicut (just as) - apparent mistake
The use of
initialisms has been popularized with the emergence of Short Message Systems
(SMS). To fit messages into the 160-character limit of SMS or the 140 character
limit of Twitter initialisms such as "LOL" have been popularized into
the mainstream.
The use of Initialisms is not necessarily a new fad. They
were were used in Rome before the Christian era. For example, the official name
for the Roman Empire, and the Republic before it, was abbreviated as SPQR
(Senatus Populusque Romanus). Inscriptions dating from antiquity, both
on stone and on coins, use a lot of abbreviation and initialism to save room
and work.
By the way it
turns out the LMG stands for "Let Me Guess" and an Internet slang.
