Grammar Moses: Make it 2 shots of BOGO SOCO cuz YOLO

Do you sometimes feel like the world around you is speaking in code?

Well, it is.

I'm a word watcher, but every so often a "word" that is new to me pops up. My first reaction is to figure out what it means. But I understand not everyone is as curious about words as I am. After all, words are my job.

And these things can come at us so quickly, they can leave us wondering if there is even a point to keeping up.

For those of you without children born this century, some of these acronyms might be new to you. Note the commonalities:

• FOMO: Fear of missing out

• JOMO: FOMO's antonym - joy of missing out

• FOGO: Fear of going out

• FOBO: Fear of better options

• BOGO: Buy one, get one

• YOLO: You only live once

Then you have the abbreviations that want to sound like the cool kids but aren't acronyms because each letter doesn't represent a word:

• HOCO: Homecoming

• SOCO: Southern Comfort, the preferred tipple of my departed surrogate mom, Shirley Schuster

• PICO: A tasty accompaniment to a Mexican meal.

No, you've not gone loco. I threw in the last one because I had a lot of it with dinner the other night, and I'm still burping it up.

The rest are used primarily by people born this century and by their parents, who want to appear as if they could have been born in this century.

People born in this century rarely talk to me unless I'm performing some sort of commerce with them, so I don't know whether they actually use these abbreviations and acronyms in speech or whether they are strictly functions of a world defined by thumb-generated keystrokes.

One notable exception is that I've heard bartenders take orders for SoCo and Coke. Shouldn't that be a SoCoCoCo?

Back in the day when seemingly everyone was in the Army and texting wasn't a thing, acronyms such as FUBAR and SNAFU became commonplace outside of the realm of the military - and remain in use today. Let's say for the purposes of a general interest newspaper that the F stood for "fouled."

The NATO phonetic alphabet was created so that life-or-death information and decisions could be transmitted telephonically to people who might have spoken a different language so there was no chance of misinterpretation.

Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Foxtrot, Golf and so on were used to denote the letters of the Roman alphabet (that's the one we use in English, if you've forgotten.)

Given that a battle might be over by the time you could spell out a sentence replete with adjectives, adverbs and 10-dollar words, such communications tended to be short and to the point.

This was the opposite of lazy acronym speech.

British English

In a recent column exploring the physiological effects of encountering bad grammar, I wrote this: "In her story, she cites researchers at the University of Birmingham (England) who brought in 41 British English-speaking adults (that's Britons who speak English rather than people who speak British English) who listened to 40 speech samples, half of which contained grammatical problems."

This puzzled reader Dick Page.

"As an ex-Brit, I am interested how you distinguish between 'Britons who speak English' and 'people who speak British English.' It makes me wonder which one I speak (or, rather, used to speak, since some American English has no doubt crept in)."

When an American says she is going "on holiday," she is mimicking British English.

Conversely, Andrew Lincoln, who portrayed Sheriff Rick Grimes in the "Walking Dead" TV series with a rather convincing Southern drawl, is a Yorkshire-born Briton who speaks English. In most of his acting endeavors, he is a Briton who speaks British English.

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/executive editor of the Daily Herald. You can buy Jim's book, "Grammar Moses: A humorous guide to grammar and usage," at

grammarmosesthebook.com. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com

and put "Grammar Moses" in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.