I start tonight with a genuine tweet from Bruno Waterfield, the Telegraph’s generally excellent and long-suffering EU correspondent:

‘Ecofin break, UK seems happy with arrangements for double QMV on EBA, later game on with France and Germany over ECB-SSM’s scope’

I’m sure you’ll all agree that this clarifies the eurozone crisis better than most versions I’ve seen. Assuming that the quarterly moving volumes of European Basketball Association fans have doubled, I feel confident that the France v Germany needle match in the quarter finals of the European Basketball Cup will be fully and properly covered by the Social Sport Media website. All I can do in conclusion is wish the chap with a fractured ecofin a rapid return to health, and hope that the United Kingdom’s approval of those capricious basketball volumes isn’t misplaced.

Contemporary acronyms and abbreviations get more like a cross between cockney rhyming slang and masonic handshakes with every month. Texting may well have been the catalyst for a lot of this: it took me three months to find out that LOL meant laugh out loud not lots of love, but things have moved well beyond that now. ‘Props’, for example, is the hip way to say “Proper Respect Due”…..to acknowledge someone’s skill or achievement. Thus ‘Props 4 winning gold’ and so forth. HMU (I’m told) is used to say “contact me”, “text me”, “phone me” or otherwise “reach me to follow up on this”. It stands for ‘hit me up’ apparently.

It’s all getting rather silly. If you praise someone and ask them to hit you up with the heads up on what’s going down, presumably you’d have to text ‘HMU with HU on WGD PROPS’. This is the sort of code the Enigma Machine would’ve faltered on: but it might have arrived at this guesswork:

‘Hezbollah mainly uncertain with Hamas undertaking on weapons of gross distraction primarily ranged over propaganda spin’

The problem here is not with text and Twitter, but rather with our never-ending species desire to use long words where simple ones will suffice. The following examples make the point, I think, very clearly:

Ecofin = Economic & Financial Committee meeting = bollocks

ECB = European Central Bank = printer

ESM = European Stability Mechanism = lending

EFSF = European Fiscal Stability Fund = waste

IMF = International Monetary Fund = joke

BOG = Bank of Greece = insolvent.

This would enable EU-based financial journalists to write much more clearly, as in:

‘Lending Greece more money is a joke and a waste of time as it’s insolvent, time for Mario to get his printer out and talk bollocks’

That message is, at 132 characters, well within the Twitter limit. It is easy to understand, accurate, and 100% deficient in anything acrowed out of all recognition by nyms.

Unfortunately, it is the truth. And such would never do in the online, abbreviated, remorselessly complex world we inhabit in 2012.