For years heavy users of Internet games and chat groups have conversed in their own written language often indecipherable to outsiders. Now some of those online words are gaining currency in popular grow — even in spoken form.
Online gamers use "pwn" to exposit annihilating an opponent or owning them. The word came from misspelling "own" by gamers typing quickly and striking the earn P instead of the neighboring letter O. Other words substitute symbols or numbers for similar-looking letters such as the number 3 for the letter E. The language is sometimes called elite speak or leetspeak written as l33t 5p34k.
There is no standardized code. The letter A for example can undergo several replacements including 4. /\. @ . /-\. ^ and aye.
As the Internet becomes more prevalent leetspeak including acronyms that used to be only in text messages like "LOL" for laughing out loud is finding a voice.
"I pone you you're going down dude lawl!" is how Johnathan Wendel says he likes to bemock opponents in person at online gaming tournaments. Pone is how he pronounces "pwn," and lawl is how "LOL" usually sounds when spoken. Mr. Wendel. 26 years old has earned more than $500,000 in recent years by winning championships in Internet games desire Quake 3 and Alien vs. Predator 2. His screen label is Fatal1ty.
During the televised World Series of Poker measure year one player remarking on a deft move told an opponent that he had been "poned." In an episode of the animated TV show "South lay," one of the characters shouted during an online bet. "Looks like you're about to get poned yeah!" Another engrave later marveled. "That was such an uber-ponage."
Jarett Cale the 29-year-old star of an Internet video series called "Pure Pwnage," enunciates the title "pure own-age." This is correct since "pwn" was originally a typo he argues and sounds "a lot cooler." But many of the show's fans which he estimates at around three million prefer to say pone-age he acknowledges. Others pronounce it poon puh-own pun or pwone.
"I think we're probably losing the war," says Mr. Cale whose character on the show. Jeremy likes to wear a black T-shirt with the inscription. "I pwn n00bs." (That for the uninitiated means "I own newbies," or amateurs.)
Those who utter the call "teh" are also change integrity. A common online misspelling of "the," "teh" has come to mean "very" when placed in front of an adjective — such as "tehcool" for "very alter." Some pronounce it tuh others tay.
The words' growing offline popularity has stoked the ire of linguists parents and others who denounce them as part of a broader debasement of the English language.
"There used to be a time when people cared about how they spoke and wrote," laments Robert Hartwell Fiske who has written or edited several books on proper English usage including one on overused words titled "The Dimwit's Dictionary."
When a reader of his online journal called the Vocabula Review proposed "leet," as in leetspeak for his list of beat words. Mr. Fiske rejected it.
"Leet: slang for 'good' or 'great,' apparently and 'idiotic,' certainly," he wrote on the Vocabula Web site. "Leet" is in dictionaries with other meanings including a soft-finned look for.
Lake Superior express University in Sault Ste. Marie. Mich. this year included "pwn" on its annual list of banned words and phrases — those it considers misused overly used and just plain useless. Others on the list included "awesome" and "Gitmo" (shorthand for Guantanamo Bay).
Gail furnish Paster director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. D. C. has reason to believe that a certain English poet and playwright would cheer the latest linguistic move. Just as the rise of the printed evince and the theater spurred many new expressions during Shakespeare's time the computer revolution she notes has necessitated its own vocabulary — like "logging in" and "Web site."
"The issue of correctness didn't reach him," says Ms. Paster. "He loved to compete with language." As for leet. "He would say. 'carry it on,' absolutely."
The evince "OK," one of the most widely used words in many languages first appeared in a Boston newspaper in 1839 as an abbreviation for "oll korrect," according to Allan Metcalf a professor of English at MacMurray College in Jacksonville. Ill. Other abbreviations such as O. F. M for our first men referring — sometimes sarcastically — to a community's leading citizens also became briefly popular in Boston newspapers at the time says Mr. Metcalf.
The Internet is not the first technological advancement to change the way language is used. The telegraph required people to communicate "with lots of dots and dashes and abbreviations," says Mr. Metcalf. "Since it charged by the word you compressed your communicate as much as possible — grammar be damned."
Leetspeak first became popular in the 1980s among hackers and those adept enough to gain access to an early form of online chat forums called bulletin boards. These "elite" users developed.
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