Everybody’s got acronyms these days.
I don’t mean pronouns, everyone’s always had those. Pronouns are grammar fundamentals. I’m talking about acronyms. It’s gotten absurd. Still, I kind of respect it. You’ve got people like senator Terry L.L.C.; definitely the most egregious grifter of the bunch. Then there’s DEXter HedgeCoin, the stock analyst, philanthropist-on-paper, and full-time corporate conflict-of-interest. The last election even had The Dick Jones PAC on the ballot, which I thought was the dick’s full name.
Anyways, I can’t remember if this was before acronyms became mainstream or in reaction to them, but we started embracing the whole idea of acronyms. We started using them as personal names, handles, tags, as a cool way to push back against how saturated everything was becoming. Excessive and saturated, that was the sentiment. I mean, you walk down the sidewalk and recognize these things but who remembers what half of them stand for? LLM, DDS, ASD, CEO, DIY, LLC, XML, XXX—there’s thousands, and those are just the easy ones. Any three letters in a row gets to mean something, and if it doesn’t, then I promise you it means something to someone somewhere. How exhausting.
So, our generation or maybe the one before us came up with the brilliant idea: what if they didn’t mean anything? What if, instead of DIY standing for “doing-it-yourself” – we just broke it down into pure sounds: “Deeyigh-Why”, “D-igh-wigh”, “deeyaiihwuy,” which is way cooler than thinking about scrubbing your toilet with baking soda or building a birdhouse out of driftwood. The names didn’t even have to make sense, it was more about vibe and feel. Kiki became Kiki-RnD. Eric went by EE Seize. Ella went with the classic BeeBee Elle LC. Dave Denbrough became DeeDee OS. Kids my age just liked how it rolled off the tongue or reverberated off the internal monologue, not what it stood for. None of it meant anything, which meant any of it could mean everything. I don’t know when the trend started, but for a while I went by the online handle C3EO, like some kind of business-savvy Star Wars robot. I thought my handle was pretty clever, but it didn’t compare to the names some of my friends came up with.
Take my friend Jenny, for example. She stumbled upon my favorite name of all. Her real name is Jenny D’Amato, but online she goes by De-Jen A.I., which I think is pure punk. Especially considering how shy and closed off Jenny is in real life, her name painted a cool fantasy in my head. The name De-Jen A.I. called forth an image, a terrifying and demarcating line that separates Jenny the flesh-and-blood, awkward, polite, and conventional, from the socially mediated and deviated persona akin to a degenerative artificial intelligence. Some glitch in her system, some ghost in the shell casting a large shadow or inhabiting some absence that already existed. That may have always existed. Jenny the degenerate, the deviant identity, the autonomous darkness, the end of the beginning. Some kind of ironic dissolution and reintegration. The name had a brief but powerful shamanistic hold over me.
I don’t think she realized how taken I was with the name or how much meaning I attributed to it. I don’t think I realized it either until much later. I liked it so much, I ended up messaging her and telling her how cool it was. She seemed pleased, though she disagreed when I said I thought DeGen was a cooler spelling than De-Jen. Like, it was less about decoupling from “Jenny”, and more about degenerating into a different identity, a different code, altogether. And maybe degeneration is the first step towards renewal, something different with the potential to turn into something better.
She said I completely missed the point, and that I’ll run out of air if I bury myself under too many layers of irony. But if I wanted to use the name for a punk band someday then she won’t stop me.
Right on.