What we might call the Modern Vowel Massacre seems to have begun sometime in the early aughts, when the band MGMT found some indie-rock fame. In 2009, in People magazine, the band informed us that the proper way to pronounce its name was to simply say the individual letters: M-G-M-T. “The confusion may lie,” the magazine said, “in the fact that the band’s original name was ‘The Management,’ which they shortened to MGMT after discovering that another artist had the rights to it.”

Around the same time, tech companies like Tumblr and Flickr arrived on the scene, dropping e’s both for distinctiveness and because the altered names made it easier to trademark, claim domain names on the internet and conduct other practical business.

Now it seems I can’t go a week without seeing a handful of consonant-mad brands, like MNDFL, a meditation studio with a branch in my Brooklyn neighborhood; or WTHN, which offers “a brand-new acupuncture experience”; or Mdrn., a “vertically-integrated real estate & lifestyle brand” whose very modernness, it seems, is suggested by its abbreviated logo.

Then there are the friends who sign their (ever-briefer) correspondence “Yrs” and the rampant contractions on Twitter, with its 280-character limit.

Vowels are the distinctive thing now. The lack of them is routine.

Time was that you had to be an experimental weirdo to ditch vowels. In “Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce used the word “disemvowelled” in a section that includes this exchange of crystal-clear dialogue:

— Nnn ttt wrd? — Dmn ttt thg.

Before we are all Joyce — God bless him — I would suggest that we take a deep breath, a mndfl one even, and consider the culling of our five (maybe six) friends. After all, there are words that can hardly do without them: muumuu, audio and oboe, just to queue up a few. One cannot text someone “b” and expect them to know one is referring to an oboe.