But methinks some of it is changing at such an unfathomable rate that – to misquote Arnie – I’m not sure that it’s not a toomah.

Lolling around the house the other morning, I scanned through the TV channels to try to find someone to tell me if anything interesting had happened in the world overnight.

It had, but not on the news bulletin – it was contained in a TV station’s promotion for one of its own shows.

It promised a “bran new epp” of some series.

Epp? Epp? What on God’s Earth is an epp?

I asked the long-suffering and usually reliable Mrs Whacked, who suggested it was possibly new-speak for “episode”.

I should look it up, she said.

“Is there an app for that?”

“An app for what?”

“An app for the epp.”

See what’s happening here, peeps. 

It has crept into the Bushwhacked hacienda and infected even the usually pedantic.

Language does that, particularly when we get too busy or too lazy to say an actual word and abbreviate it.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth reduced to an OED), “app” is an abbrev. for “apparently”, while the previously accepted abbrev. of “application” should be “applic”.

 So, app we misuse app while applic has got the flick.

Spoken words are now app so precious that we cannot waste a single vibration of the vocal cord on them. 

Is it really so difficult to say “episode”, and who sent out the memo that epp was now acceptable, or should that be acc?

How does this stuff get around? 

As one of my daughters occasionally says: it’s totes amazeballs. 

And, to tell the truth, it may well be, or not.

Whatevs.

But what was the process under which “totes amazeballs” was now the way to say “highly interesting and unexpected”.

It probably came from the same nong who invented and then demanded everyone else says “my bad” instead of “Sorry, that was my fault, but you’ll just have to build a wall and get over it.”

I was recently told to “gram” something.

Gram? Gram? Telegram? (Watch the blank reaction to that one, peeps) Polygram? Kilogram?  

None of that makes sense.

No, “gram” is a new verb, meaning to send an image via the Instagram social media network.

OMG. Who knew?

Sometimes the abbreviation is counterproductive. 

“WWW”, when spoken, has nine syllables, three times as many as saying “world wide web.”

But the art of modern abbreviation has reached what surely must be the pinnacle of brevity. 

It’s this ):(

It’s called Schrödinger’s emoticon … something that’s simultaneously bad and good, happy and sad at the same time. 

Like hearing that Schrödinger’s cat is dead after all, but you didn’t like it in the first place.

Later! Or even l8r. And…umm, like YOLO.