Abbreviations sometimes make me crazy.

YOLO? It sounds terrible. It sounds like what they have the village idiot greeting passersby with in a low budget film about Medieval life.

Or maybe the jester. Someone, anyhow, who is typically the butt of jokes.

"YOLO, m'lady."

Maybe it's just the jester's name.

It gets even worse when people manage to shoot that one out while maintaining a straight face. It gets disturbingly prevalent in bars, right around 12:30am as the drunkenness is setting in and the common sense is taking flight. Believe me, I've been there, I know. I know that place. Where you're balancing on that tightrope of "Stop drinking now" immediately above the empty space of "But it's making this night so much fun."

But stop saying "YOLO."

My reaction to hearing people holler "YOLO" before downing a shot of SoCo and lime is very much like my reaction to seeing two people grinding on the dance floor. It's this sudden, shock of awareness that the objectively uncool things that people do, that are thought of as being cool, are not cool. It doesn't register until you happen to look at them sideways at just the right second and see them in stark reality.

Two people grinding looks really weird. I'm sure I look really weird grinding. There's no way not to look weird when there's butt wiggling occurring and the two people doing the wiggling are taking it very, very seriously. There just isn't.

Anyway, I digress. You only live once, right?

HAM is another one. Thankfully, it hasn't caught on too heavily. Probably because there is simply no way to make "HAM" sound cool.

Saying, "I'm going out HAM tonight" calls forth alternate images of being in a musty basement somewhere, hunched over an old radio, and large quantities of pork. Neither of which is particularly related to swanky nightclubs and dangerously attractive people, coupled with top shelf alcohol.

In fact, "hard as a motherfucker" couldn't sound LESS like "HAM" in terms of being relatable.

How do these things happen?

How do we tell people that the thing they think they're so cleverly abbreviating just sounds so much better when they leave it alone.

These things can run amok. I know. Because back in elementary school, "H.A.G.S." and "L.Y.L.A.S." were all the rage and there were always a few smart alecs that thought they'd run with it. I wound up with a few yearbook messages like the following, "H.A.G.S.I.H.Y.H.F.A.I.W.S.Y.N.Y."

Not kidding.

(Have a great summer. I hope you have fun and I will see you next year.)

Imagine if people start yelling "YOLOHAM!" That's the village idiot's village.

ASMMC.