You 'kids' and your 'abbreviations'

 

Before we roll our eyes too hard at Those Kids and What They're Doing To Our Words, it's always fun to dig into the archives -- here, your 1941 San Francisco Examiner -- and see how things looked in the past.

Why is "gas" in quotes in the Oct. 22 business section but quoteless in the news section on the same day? Probably not a fight between desks. The top hed refers to real gas, see -- the kind that's used to run factories. The "gas" in the second hed is that stuff autoists put in their autos. 

If you used your i'Phone to schedule a time for your 'flu shot, you might not be too surprised at the 'chute escape described below. And, yes, getting in the local university angle is like getting the dog's name -- by the time you're qualified to work for Hearst,* you're expected to know that kind of stuff.

 * Warren Breed, author of "Social control in the newsroom" (1955) and a former Hearst reporter, described this phenomenon in an interview for a journal article much later: Nobody had to tell you when a story should begin "Bands playing and flags flying...", because you already knew