I’m not a major Christian, but have always been annoyed with uses of XMAS as a substitute for the word Christmas. Whenever I see it, I pronounce it how it is spelled: EX-MAS. It could be interpreted as past tense, cancelled or terminated MAS … as in ex-wife or a religious mass that is honored no more. It always struck me as a stupid, thoughtless or disrespectful way to market Christmas shopping binges.
The next popular truncation to annoy me was THX which some considered to be a useful substitute for THANKS or Thank You. They are not the same thing. The shortened perversion says they are too lazy or too insincere to write the whole word or pair of words out. It typically appeared in complete sentences surrounded by words fully spelled out. The one word possibly expressing gratitude was the only word not spelled out.
Then texting on hand-held devices became more popular than reality. OMG … the truncation of our language, thoughts and emotions exploded. The masses moved straight from the linguistic, expressive richness of an ocean to the shallow world of a wading pool utilizing the vocabularic depth of a pre-schooler.
As you can see in black and white, these truncations can be interpreted more than one way. You would never catch anyone who respects our language, community or culture abbreviating sincere expressions.
