What is IMHO and what it eats

In our time, the Internet has become very firmly entrenched in the everyday life of many of our contemporaries. We need it for work, communication, recreation, searching for interesting information, like-minded people and new acquaintances - that is, practically in all spheres of human activity, and in this connection it can not but affect our daily life. In particular, the peculiar language of online communication increasingly turns into ordinary life.

In Internet communication, there are a number of unique phrases and words that have never been seen before - very often these are abbreviations originally used to speed up the exchange of opinions, because a person still prints more slowly than he thinks, and the appearance of such abbreviations is quite justified. Over time, they became full-fledged, widely used words and firmly entered almost all the languages of the world, and not only in the written speech of the Internet community.

One of the most striking examples is the word "IMHO", unusual for our hearing. Many of us, faced with it for the first time, were at first puzzled and did not immediately understand what IMHO was, but almost immediately intuitively felt its meaning. It is used in a specific context, from which it is immediately possible to understand what IMHO means - so they say, when they want to express their opinion and emphasize that this is just an opinion, and the author does not pretend that it should be the ultimate truth. Apparently, due to this understandability, not everyone knows for sure what IMHO is, but only guess about its meaning. In fact, this is an English-language abbreviation, formed from the expression "In My Humble Opinion", which means "in my humble opinion." There is also a point of view that the original phrase sounded like "In My Honest Opinion" - "in my honest opinion." IMHO, the first version of the decryption conveys the meaning of this concept somewhat more precisely.

Over time, this abbreviation became quite a full-fledged word and spread throughout the international Internet community, in particular, settled in many languages. The people did not invent the bicycle and invent their own notions of this concept - except that variants of decoding began to appear in their own language. In Russian, in particular, it is possible to convey what is IMHO, the expression "I have an opinion, albeit erroneous" - of course, very approximate, but quite suitable. Also, very many users have tried to decipher the IMHO value in its own way, with some degree of seriousness, and sometimes these interpretations are quite amusing, though not always literary, but quite accurate.

By the way about the seriousness: very often the not quite direct meaning of IMHO is used, rather, with irony or sarcasm. This happens in cases when the interlocutor expresses very blatant delusions as arguments, and the rest try to bring this to his attention, pointing out as "his humble opinion" how it really is. I must say, it's pretty funny.

As new phrases and phrases enter our life and languages, disputes on this topic are getting hotter. Very many, in particular, the overwhelming majority of philologists, believe that such phrases clog up the language - as a rule, such people are not only against specific slang words, but also against borrowing from other languages, and do not consider them for full-fledged Russian words, and here Such a wonderful case, when so cute combine both stimuli! Nevertheless, to whom, as not to philologists, to know that if such a phenomenon takes place, then it is no longer entirely right to deny it: it is the same as denying the obvious in any other case. Any language is alive, and it constantly changes, whether someone likes it or not, and this process is quite fascinating and interesting. In theory, philology should be interested in precisely this process, and not deny its obviousness. Naturally, the classical literary language should remain generally accepted in many cases, but sometimes the desire for strict observance of its canons is reminiscent of the old anecdote about "Brave, please, more carefully, or I'm dripping tin for my collar." Any living language has the right to change according to the requirements of the time, and for the tranquility of conservatives who do not want to know what IMHO is, there are peaceful Sanskrit and Latin.