@Talismaster
I blame it, at least partially, on texting with smartphones and Twitter's character limits; both of these encourage the use of the fewest keystrokes possible.
Of course, abbreviating text as much as possible goes back to the very beginning of computing, due to the memory limits they were dealing with.
It's a very different world than the one I grew up in.
I remember back in grade school, when my father was responsible for setting up the City of Salem, Oregon's Utility Billing system using a state of the art 12Kb IBM Mainframe computer, one of the earliest that would accept a program from punch cards instead of having to use jumper wires to set the program. 12Kb was the largest program you could enter.
A couple of years later, my sister's first portable battery operated calculator, which would only add, subtract, multiply and divide, cost US $50.00.
I was in high school when my parents got a used electronic typewriter, which replaced the portable manual typewriter my mother had gotten back when she was in college.
I'll be 58 in a month.
Man, I ain't seen nothing, my grandparents were all born before 1900, and my maternal grandmother was 104 when she died in 2001; she went from horse & buggy to men walking on the Moon, from telegraphs to cell phones!
Craziness, man, craziness.