Twenty and thirty years ago, acronyms such as “AFK”, ‘BFFL”, YOLO”, “ROFLMAO”, and “TTYL” were hardly ideas that came to mind as full phrases. Instant messaging and texting were obsolete concepts, creating no use for acronyms such as “Away From Keyboard”. Many people had dear and best friends, but felt no reason to conceptualize it in 4 letters available to put next to a hashtag on an Instagram post (Best Friends For Life). People accepted to idea of carpe diem and living life to the fullest, but artist Drake had not yet coined a term that would be used in a large percentage of text and instant messaging conversations for teens (YOLO). The fact is, the acronyms, capitalizations, and phrases that are used with regularity in Super Sad True Love Story may not be as inappropriate, obsolete, or nearly as far-fetched as we may believe.

On page 88, Vishnu introduces the term/acronym FAC meaning Forming a Community. He states: “It’s, like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you. Essentially it’s a system that picks up blood pressure levels and “tells her how much you want to do her”. With the level of knowledge already available to the society about one another through the apparat technology, this not-so far fetched idea caught on and was used several times by the group of guys in a matter of minutes. The same way our current society and culture ridicule such possibilities of connection and word usage, prior generations would have ridiculed our manner of communication and the types of phrases we have coined to create meaningless “shortcuts” in our everyday live. These acronyms and messaging concepts are simply the results of a more updated, faster, technologically updated culture that is not too dissimilar from our own.