In one of my classes back when I was in college had an assignment where we were to read aloud a film review that we had written. One of my classmates reviewed Gone With the Wind; her review was heartfelt, sincere and well researched. However, during her reading everyone else in the class was going ape-shit because the paper’s author, reading her paper aloud, kept referring to the film as “gee dub ul yoo tee dub ul yoo” because nearly all of her research references wrote out the name of the film that way. However, reading the letters aloud doubled the syllables of the title – opposite of the desired effect of abbreviation.
Much like that inefficiency, the world wide web and its tedious URLs (Uniform Resource Locator, i.e. web address) nearly all use some form of the dreaded “www”. So, reading out a web address to someone still often requires saying, “dub ul yoo, dub ul yoo, dub ul yoo” which utterly drives me crazy! How long ago did Al Gore invent the internet? 1983? You would think that after 40 freaking years SOMEONE would have stood up and said, “can we please just say ‘dub’ instead of ‘dub ul yoo’?” I mean, just because we’ve been saying “dub ul yoo” since around 1066 doesn’t mean that the pronunciation is locked in place. We live in an age where dictionaries add official words to the English lexicon every year. Can’t we please get smart and efficient and change the way we say, “W”? Think of how many billions of seconds the world will save by eliminating the expression of three syllables instead of nine?