Ever went to a foreign country without being able to speak the language over there and no translator within reach? You are stumbling through the streets, often guessing what something means. If the letters are not known, this attempt gets even worse. However, even if you know the letters and the words seem to be like the word you know, you still should be careful to assume you really guessed it right. Just because the German "bekommen" sounds like "become" that doesn't mean it means the same in English as well. In fact, if you want to erm...become the laughing stock of the whole shop, try to use "become" in the exact same context like you would use "bekommen". Enjoy!
When I went online it wasn't completley like in a foreign country at first. Things were new and it took me a bit to find my way around, but I understand what most people said. English is not that hard to get. Although, when I got deeper into the whole Internet, I noticed something odd.
I saw letters, Latin letters to be more exact, but I wasn't able to put a meaning to it. And then there were numbers in between. Like 0nw3d. I seemed to have stumbled over a code of a secret society. This secret society, with approximately 1 billion members, bestowed on each member their very own enigma machine that enabled them to communicate in random letters that would only make sense to them.
After some frustration, I figured out that this code was by no means as good as the code used in the Second World War and it certainly didn't need an incredible mind like Alan Turing to figure it out. Mostly it is just a testimony of extreme laziness, bad grammar, even worse spelling and often contained the kind of insider-jokes that were only funny because you know only your friend understood what you said and not because the actual joke was so hilarious.
To be fair, I grew up in an area of Germany were people are also extremely lazy when it comes to language. We tend to incorporate our dialect into the written language which explains a lot of the supposedly bad grammar and spelling. Therefore, I can relate to the Internet spelling and grammar. I'm not one of those people that go crazy and starts calling someone names when I discover a mistake of any kind. It happens with all of us. However, even though I am pretty much addicted to the Internet, and I use some of those strange letter combinations myself, I refuse to use it as often as many do out there.
Yes, I know I'm lame. I'm old-fashioned, don't know any better and of course I'm intolerant. I just can't use some expressions without feeling utterly stupid. Why should I reply to everything that seems to shows a poor kid falling of a skateboard with "FAIL!" or "EPICFAIL!!"? I understand it is just a slang. When I was 14 years old I considered myself to be very cool and above everyone, because I could use some not so secret sign language. And when you are 14, I can forgive you for the need to feel different to the lame grown ups around you. Most wanted to do that around that age. But, to be honest, looking back at it, not everything I did back then made a lot of sense or makes me so proud that I want to repeat it again and again. Running away with one slice of bread come to my mind...Being, 20 and talking like you just hit puberty, makes you look a bit like some social awkward person that hasn't got over the fact yet that their body changed several years back.
That being said, I love the creativity of language use on the web. People are much more daring on the web. They play with language, have fun with it, use it to their advantage and are not bound by it. And that is definitely something to applaud. Nevertheless, just repeating some strange acronyms like FTW or STFU, using the same strange grammar in most posts like "Izhez bad" or reject vocals completely as if they all of the sudden switched into Hebrew, gets on my nerves. By all means, please stay creative, but stop being so repetitive. Create new terms, keep developing your vocabulary and don't just repeat something without even checking if it makes any sense in that context just because you want to belong.
Whenever I use those terms I try to remember that no matter how excitingly new, cutting-edge and different the Internet language sounds to me, in the end it still has to follow the same rule as the language in the real world. People have to understand me. And just because I happen to know some words, it doesn't mean I will belong.
And to follow my own amendment, here are some short explanations of the strange words I used here. noob seemed to have come from online games and originally refers to a new unexpierenced player that is not willing to learn something from older players. Nowadays you can see it used to label any newcomer. Pwn means to own somebody in the sense of humilating someone. It again derived from the gamers community and most likely was a typo. 0wn3d means again owned and therefore means the same as pwn. The "d" in the end indicates the past tense.
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