Nowadays, the Internet is very firmly in the everyday life of many of our contemporaries. We need him for work, communication, leisure, searching for information of interest, like-minded people and new acquaintances - that is, in almost all spheres of human activity, and in this regard, he cannot but influence our daily lives. In particular, the peculiar language of online communication is increasingly moving into ordinary life.
There are a number of idioms and words in Internet communication that have never been seen before - very often these are abbreviations that were originally used to accelerate the exchange of opinions, because a person still prints more slowly than he thinks, and the appearance of such abbreviations is justified. Over time, they became full-fledged, widely used words and firmly entered almost all languages of the world, and not only into the written speech of the Internet community.
One of the most striking examples is the word "IMHO", unusual for our hearing. Many of us, having encountered him 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 you can immediately understand what IMHO means - they say it when they want to express their opinion and emphasize that this is just an opinion, and the author does not claim that it should become the ultimate truth. Apparently, because of this understandability, not everyone knows for sure what IMHO is, but only guess about its meaning. This is actually an English abbreviation derived from the expression "In My Humble Opinion", which means "in my humble opinion." There is also the 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 accurately.
Over time, this abbreviation became a fully-fledged word and spread throughout the international Internet community, in particular, settled in many languages. The people did not begin to reinvent the wheel and come up with their own designations for this concept - except that decryption options began to appear in their own language. In Russian, in particular, it is possible to convey what IMHO is, with the expression "I have an opinion, albeit erroneous" - of course, very approximately, but it fits perfectly. Also, many users tried to decipher the meaning of IMHO in their own way, with varying degrees of severity, and sometimes these interpretations are very funny, though not always literary, but quite accurate.
Speaking of seriousness: very often the not quite direct meaning of IMHO is used, rather, with irony or sarcasm. This happens in cases where the interlocutor expresses absolutely blatant nonsense as arguments, and the rest try to bring this to his attention, indicating as "their humble opinion" how it really is. I must say, it turns out pretty funny.
As new phrases and meanings enter our lives and languages, debates on this topic are getting hotter. Very many, in particular, the vast majority of philologists, believe that such phrases clog up the language - as a rule, such people speak not only against specific slang words, but also against borrowings from other languages, and do not consider them full-fledged Russian words, and here such a wonderful case when both irritants combine so nicely! Nevertheless, to whom, if not philologists, to know that if such a phenomenon takes place, then to deny it is no longer entirely correct: it is the same as denying the obvious in any other case. Any language is lively, and it is constantly changing, like it or not, and this process is quite exciting and interesting. In theory, philology should be interested in this particular 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 resembles an old joke about “Please solder more carefully, otherwise I’ll drip the tin from my collar”. Any living language has the right to change according to the requirements of the time, and for the peace of the conservatives who do not want to know what IMHO, there are pacifying Sanskrit and Latin.