“ILY （I Love You）！” Susan Maushart's 16-year-old daughter often calls out over her shoulder as she leaves the house. Sure, actual words would be better. But Mom knows not to complain. “A mother of teenagers is pathetically grateful for an ‘I love you’ no matter what form it takes,” she observes.

「愛力！」蘇珊．毛夏特16歲的女兒出門時總會扭過頭大喊一聲。當然，能逐字說出「我愛妳」3個字更好，但做媽的知道，沒什麼好抱怨的。她表示：「不管出於什麼形式，十幾歲孩子的媽能聽到『我愛你』已經感激涕零了。」

Then there are the various forms of “LOL （laugh out loud）” that her teens use in regular parlance - it's become a conjugable verb by now. And of course, there's the saltier acronym used by son Bill: “WTF（What the f*ck）, Mom？！” But before you judge, note that former VP candidate Sarah Palin just used that one in a TV interview. And CNN's Anderson Cooper used it on his show the other night.

她那幾個青少年孩子還常把不同形式的「爆笑」掛在嘴邊，如今LOL已經演變成可以變化詞形的動詞了。當然，她兒子比爾還有比較粗口的頭文字縮寫：「搞屁啊，老媽？！」但在做出任何批判前，別忘了前副總統候選人莎拉．裴林才在電視訪問中說過；CNN主播庫波，有一天晚上也在節目中脫口而出。

Acronyms have been around for years. But with the advent of text and Twitter-language, it certainly feels like we're speaking in groups of capital letters a lot more. It's a question that intrigues linguists and other language aficionados.

縮略語已經存在多年。但隨著簡訊和推特用語出現，我們使用頭文字大寫字母的時候的確增加了。這個問題已經引起語言學家及其他語言迷的興趣。

“It's fascinating,” says Scott Kiesling, a socio-linguist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “What's interesting to me as a linguist is figuring out which words get picked up, and why. What is it that makes OMG （Oh My God） and WTF and LOL so useful that they spread from the written to the spoken form？”

美國匹茲堡大學社會語言學家基斯林教授說：「這實在很有意思。身為語言學家，我覺得最有趣的是找出哪些用語常被選用，原因是什麼。到底是什麼使『歐買尬』、『搞屁啊』和『爆笑』這麼常被使用，甚至從書面發展到口語？」

Which brings us to WTF, an acronym that needs no translation. When Palin used the expression recently in a Fox News interview - twice in two sentences, actually - some pundits were a little shocked. （Palin was playing on the president's “Win the Future” message in his State of the Union speech.） “That's going to be a tough one for her to come back from and explain,” remarked conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on MSNBC's “Morning Joe.”“It was misplaced humor. But I assume she thought it was clever and thus would not be judged,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

就讓我們來談談WTF這個不需要翻譯的縮略語。裴林最近接受福斯新聞台訪問時使用這個用語，事實上，在兩句話中用了兩次，一些專家不免有些震驚。（裴林用WTF暗批歐巴馬總統在國情咨文中所提的「贏得未來」的頭文字縮寫。）保守派評論家布坎南在MSNBC晨間節目《早安，喬》中表示：「她很難回頭自圓其說。」賓州大學安能堡公共政策研究中心主任凱瑟琳．霍爾．賈米森說：「這叫錯位的幽默。我想，她自以為很聰明，因此不願接受批評。」

Clever may be in the eyes of the beholder. But Palin is not the only prominent person to use the expression on TV recently. On “Anderson Cooper 360” Monday night, the host was commenting on rapper B.O.B.'s use of an airplane's public address system to perform for the captive passengers. “WTF, B.O.B.？” Cooper asked. Imagine if he'd said the actual words - a quick call from network executives might have ensued. But WTF seems to have become a winking way of saying something with a little edge, a little bite, without being truly offensive.

聰明與否可能見仁見智。但裴林不是最近唯一在電視上爆粗口的名人。在周一晚播出的《安德森庫波360》節目中，主持人庫波在評論饒舌歌手B.O.B.使用機上播音系統為被困機上的乘客表演時質問：「WTF，B.O.B.？」試想，如果他逐字罵三字經，CNN主管可能立刻來電關切。但用WTF好像變成一種心照不宣的說法，代表有點不滿，一點斥責，但不真的覺得被冒犯。

So just how new is the use of acronyms？ Did this all come from Internet speak, texting and the like？ In fact, acronyms date back to ancient times, Greene points out - the Romans and the Greeks used them. In the United States, they came into prominence in the early 20th century with the New Deal, the series of economic programs passed during the first term of Franklin D. Roosevelt - who, of course, became known by his three initials. They are widely used in the military and today's government bureaucracy.

那麼，使用縮寫到底是多麼晚近的事？難道這一切全來自網路交談和發簡訊之類的？格林指出，事實上首字母縮寫詞可以追溯到遠古時代，羅馬和希臘人早就使用它們了。美國則直到20世紀初小羅斯福總統第一任任內推行新政，通過一系列經濟改革方案時才蔚為流行，當然他自己名字三個首字母縮寫FDR也青史留名。這些縮寫在軍中和今天政府官僚體系中也廣泛使用。

People who think acronyms are new may be suffering from what linguists call a “recency illusion” - the illusion that something is new merely because one has just noticed it. But one thing that does seem genuinely new, Greene says, “is that these three-letter phrases from the Internet and twitter-speak are being spoken out loud.” And so, maybe you CAN blame the kids for that. However, Greene notes, “People have been complaining about what the kids are doing to the language since ancient times. Language is always changing. It's a fact of life.” And besides, young people are always on a search for the next new thing. And so this whole spoken-acronym thing may be a fad, destined for the linguistic garbage heap in a matter of a few years.

那些認為首字母縮寫是新玩意兒的人，可能患有語言學家所說的「新近錯覺症」，意指因自己才剛剛注意到某樣東西，而誤以為它是新玩意的錯覺。但格林說：「有一件事似乎真的很新：這些濫觴於網路和推文的『三字經』可以大聲說出來。」所以，也許你可以責怪孩子說話粗魯，但格林指出：「自古以來，人們一直在抱怨孩子正在戕害語言，但語言永遠不斷在變化，這是活生生的事實。」何況，年輕人總是在不斷尋找下一個新事物。所以這整個口語縮寫可能是一種風尚，注定在幾年內被丟到語言垃圾堆裡。

In this file photo shows Susan Maushart, second from left, playing a board game with her children at the family home in Perth, Australia, before moving to the U.S. Maushart's children frequently use acronyms like “ILY！” and “LOL.”

在這張檔案照中，蘇珊．毛夏特（左2）正在澳洲柏斯家中和孩子們玩拼字遊戲，他們隨後舉家搬到美國。毛夏特的孩子經常使用縮略語，如「愛力！」和「爆笑」。（圖／美聯社）