So there are two meanings of the initials FTW, and one of them isn’t all that nice but the other actually comes from a game show. For The Win is the original meaning of these three letters and it was coined during the game Hollywood Squares. If you’re old enough to remember this game then you should recall how the host would always say “for the win” when a person could end the game. It’s a fairly simple origin but it stuck and after a while became what it is now. Of course there are always those that will feel the need to twist something to their own ends and create another meaning for a normally innocent acronym into a statement that might still mean something but isn’t entirely positive. In other words, F— the World.
How you use it can usually determine just what it means but there are those that will use it in both ways which is highly confusing and kind of contradictory really. But ever since the Hell’s Angels and other biker gangs started using this meaning of FTW the saying took off and was used in many different areas for many different reasons. It’s incredibly hard if not impossible to stop a saying from spreading once it’s been leaked, and in many cases it’s not even realistic to think that it won’t spread once it’s out. But this is one of those that can get a bit confusing and even a little distracting.
Acronyms have been a big thing for a while and got even bigger when Twitter came around. Now almost every other word you might hear from a person will be an acronym and half of them are hard to understand since their meaning seem to change from time to time. It’s a good thing on one hand since some acronyms are easier to say than pronouncing the entire string of words. But when acronyms start to get long and complicated then it becomes a bit of a bother. FTW is one of the easiest acronyms to remember simply because it’s been around for a while, but it’s also easy to recall since it’s used quite often.
Others however are starting to get a bit out of hand as they’re being made up on the spot and aren’t being given full explanation before they’re used in countless posts on social media. In many ways it makes those of us who can remember a life without so many acronyms used on a daily basis feel like dinosaurs. In some way the use of acronyms is like a hidden language that we have to decode just to talk to people now.
Maybe I’m showing my age by saying such a thing but if you really look at the English language it’s become a thing that has been fractured again and again by different regional dialects and now by generational dialects that continue to frustrate and confuse those trying to use it. While some remain simple, others are beginning to run loose without much help as to their meaning.
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