Yes indeed - I thought everyone knew that /s :)

You’ll be amazed how much googling I do when having conversations with friends - I wasn’t born in the West and things like movie references leave me confused af! But I hide it… thank goodness for urban dictionary

Looks up "af"

The other problem is people not capitalizing abbreviations as they should. You see even major news organizations doing it. The entire nation of Great Britain appears to think there's a space agency called "Nasa." Ignorant AF.

I think I read somewhere that there’s a rule for abbreviations that if they’re “pronounceable” you shouldn’t use all caps. For example, you write IBM because you articulate the letters, it’s not “Ibbem”. Conversely you don’t say the letters in Nasa, but you do in NSA and so forth.

It's dependent on the organisation's style guide, so not a 'hard and fast' rule, but you're correct

Other examples like this are whether numbers are spelt out (eg one vs 1), and at what point that changes (eg spelling out "ten" but writing 1,000)

But yeah, depends on the organisation.

Check out how the New Yorker deals with the word co-operation :P

As a Swede I have unfortunately lost all my respect for the New Yorker as an authority on language since I learned about their usage of the letter ö, which I guess is what you're referring to.[1]

Having a native language where this letter is very much present and carries phonetic meaning, it completely trips me up. It annoys me almost as much as when people use the equivalent letter Ø instead of the actual ∅ for "empty set". I'd probably even choose ⦰ but of course all of these choices require some awareness that a character is "taken" as well as some measure of consideration for people other than yourself and those just like you.

End of old man rant.

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

Hahaha yes, that's what I was referring to and you're right to be infuriated by it. It's purely elitist horse-dust from The New Yorker to use ö rather than chucking a hyphen in there instead.

Was a little surprised by your comment - I don’t think you’re aware of usage in subcultures, it’s not about grammar.

Capitalization or lack thereof can indicates tone - e.g yelling etc.

For example - What’s up mf! (greetings) vs. What’s up MF! (fight/challenge)

Abbreviations are not capitalized but acronyms are.

But what's considered as an OG account? Age? Short handle? Something that isn't imaginative or a portmanteau of something?

I remember the ICQ days where the shorter your ICQ number, you are the OG of OG's..

OG refers to precedence due to age. It also tends to correlate with short names, but that's just because people like short names - and so short names are registered earlier and thus are older.

urban dictionary can warp your belief in humanity.

Can be simply read as OriGinal

Well TIL. I thought it stood for Old Guard meaning "original or long-standing members of a group", but I'll take "original gangster" instead, sounds better :-)

OG does not mean “original gangster”, only confused senile journalists believe this. Just read it as “original”, or accept that nobody uses it as an abbreviation anymore.

Or that guy @slack on Twitter. Or @gusto on same

The ultimate example to me is the nissan.com guy.

Oh! How could I forget! Legend! And they had to get NissanUSA.com

OG is the old gang of people, the original early founders/adopters/users.

OG means "original gangster": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/OG (see History and Etymology section)

> slang: someone or something that is an original or originator and especially one that is highly respected or regarded

Old Gang of people... the original gangster. This doesn't seem wrong. OG directly translates to Original Gangster, but is used to refer to the old crowd, the original people, the firsts, etc. In extreme example, it would not be considered incomprehensible (but perhaps strange) to say something like "native americans are the OG north american inhabitants"... really nothing to do with gangsters.

Technically true, but... if you say it means "old group" or "original gaggle" or "oldest goat," you should probably expect to be corrected, because it sounds like an implication that that's what OG actually stands for.

It is notable in this case that gang is the root of gangster.