Knowing your leet from your pwned

This link has a look at some internet jargon and helps explain the origins of some of the language on the net. If you're studying Language Change or Language and Technology it should be handy.

# hashtags - this year's LOL?

Following on from the post about changing punctuation, here's a guest post from Emma Bertouche who is an Online Marketing Executive for a language translations company and writes for several websites and blogs regarding language and social media.



Advances in technology have always added to and changed the way we use the English language. The rise of social media and the regular social network user is the latest example of the internet driving many new or distorted words and phrases into common language, infiltrating themselves into daily use in written and spoken communication.

Many blogs and articles are written every day on how this is perceived to be diluting and misusing the English language – and many other languages for that matter. One phenomenon that needs closer examination is the growing use of the lowly hashtag - ‘#’ – to emphasise an argument, feeling,  or solidarity with a group.

For those people unfamiliar with Twitter and the hashtag phenomenon, words or phrases are prefixed with a hash symbol (#), with multiple words concatenated, such as:
#RealAle is my favourite kind of #beer

Then, a person can search for the string #RealAle and this tagged word will appear in the search engine results. Hashtags are used by people to try and get a topic trending. A trending topic is a word, phrase or topic that is posted (tweeted) multiple times, these trending topics are then shown on websites, including Twitter's own front page. The aim is that  users can then search for any Tweets containing that specific term or phrase and read what other Twitter users across the globe are saying about it.

On the surface this seems to be another internet trend, spreading from person to person within the online culture, which originated on the Twitter social networking site. So when someone in the office recently described themselves (in the spoken word) as “hashtag smug” it was an example of how quickly the language of social media is making an appearance not only in other online communities, but also creeping into everyday spoken conversation.

The phenomenon has also been picked up by The New York Times, which wrote this interesting article about the hashtag making this way into our lives.  We increasingly see instances of the hashtag being implemented on other social networks, where characters are no longer capped(the internet equivalent of shouting)  yet people use it to stress a word or point that they are trying to make. Furthermore, unlike ‘text speak’ and the lingo of teenagers, this trend is not exclusive to a specific demographic of people, and can have universal appeal.

Twitter is, in essence, the 21st Century equivalent of William Tyndale, facilitating the mass distribution of the written word across an era-defining medium; in Tyndale's case, Caxton's printing press, and in the case of Twitter, social media. The messages they communicate may have been different (Tyndale translated the Bible, rather than screamed #WELOVEJUSTINBIEBER) but their aim is the same; for as many people to see their message as possible. Similar to Tyndale, however, there are many clamouring to cry heresy at the implementation of a new language variant, and opposition to the hashtag is growing to levels previously experienced as a result of the rise of texting and email. It is to be hoped those opposed don't follow Pope Clement VII's example, and seek to eradicate the problem as they see it. Thankfully, I don't think nouns are flammable. 

Of course as with any form of publicity, be it self promoting or for business there can often be a downside or even a backlash at attempts to use the hashtag for marketing purposes. People often see the opportunity to use trending topics to spam Twitter with unrelated topics but then include a popular hashtag to ensure their tweet gets seen be a decent number of Twitter users. One of the more documented mistakes was that of Habitat who used hashtags including #IranElection and #Mousavi to promote discounts on their products, making for some heroically non-sensical tweets. The idea behind the madness is not a particularly clever one at the best of times but linking a range of home furniture to  sensitive humanitarian crises is only ever going to anger people. .

Social media trends do not provide the first examples of  ‘moral panic’ regarding language change, either. In fact, there is a long history of alarm at evolving language trends. The rise of the postcard brought with it concerns that, due to the limited amount of space people had to write their messages, the use of the English language would be compromised. Comparisons between the post card and Twitter have already been made by The Daily Mail, back in 2009.

It will be interesting to learn what future language scholars make of the introduction of social media and its effects on the spoken word – there is already debate raging on what to call this new phenomenon.
While researching the hashtag I found a web forum where linguists were asking “Is there a linguistics term for glued-together Twitter hashtags, such as #vacationwishlist, #isawesome, and #wordsthatdescribeme?” The closest answer I could find was portmanteau but a hashtag doesn’t create new words; it just lumps existing words together.

 There doesn’t seem to be an agreed linguistic term for this yet, but people are still able to easily associate meaning to it. Unlike the controversy of ‘text speak’ entering the English Language, which seemed to scythe down language to its most basic construct,  would the inclusion of hashtag English (as indeed with other languages that communicate via Twitter) be as contentious?

In the same way that people now question whether it is acceptable to include ‘smilies’ in emails to colleagues, the fact that the use of #hashtag  is up for discussion means that some people already find it acceptable and do use them - whether others like it or not.

Although I have only heard one example of ‘hashtag’ in spoken communication, it will be interesting to see if this catches on. Social media is presenting a whole new set of questions on the future of language for the students and tutors to solve, and who knows - maybe if I was ‘down with the kids’ I wouldn’t feel so #confused .

The geeks shall inherit the earth

online standardisation or online gaming?

While the OED adds OMG and FYI to its (digital) pages and argument rages over where LOL was first used (was it among geeks on usenet, mobile phone text messagers or old ladies thinking it meant lots of love on messages to their grandchildren?) a whole area of abbreviation seems to have been overlooked.

This article on gamer slang which appears on Nerd Trek summarises some of the abbreviations used by online gamers who play World of Warcraft, Everquest and Lord of the Rings Online, among others. Like lots of these things, the abbreviations are a generally accepted shorthand (mostly initialisms and the odd acronym) designed to speed up communication between players when they're chatting to other players or cooperating at moments of high drama, like when you're you're about to take down Gamgee, the mystical dwarf of Nimbus 5 and haven't powered up your level 45 inferno spell.

We covered some gamer slang on this blog a while ago (here and here), but since I have regained control of my life by  stopping playing such games (all hail the Xbox 360 and two slipped discs for helping rid me of my crippling MMORPG addiction!) I've not really followed it as closely as I used to, but it looks like nothing much has changed in the language of online games in a little while. With the rise of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and programmes like Ventrilo, which allow you to talk to other gamers, perhaps the days of language innovation in online gamer chat are over?

TMI? New initialisms make it into dictionary

Can a dictionary ever have Too Much Information? Has the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gone too far in adding initialisms like LOL, OMG and FYI to its latest update?

Probably not, because even though these initialisms (initial letters sounded out as their letter names) and acronyms (initial letters sounded out as a complete word) aren't really words as such, they're increasingly frequent in their use and functionally very handy.

What's also interesting about them is that they often have a longer history than we might realise:

As is often the case, OED’s research has revealed some unexpected historical  perspectives: our first quotation for OMG is from a personal letter from 1917; the letters LOL had a previous life, starting in 1960, denoting an elderly woman (or ‘little old lady’; see LOL n./1); and the entry for FYI  [FYI phr., adj., and n.], for example, shows it originated in the language of memoranda in 1941.

Elsewhere in the same OED update, the use of the verb "to heart" is commented upon. We're no doubt all familiar with T-shirts bearing the I ♥ NY/LDN/your mum logo or something similar, but the expression "to heart" is now registering as a bona fide version of "to love":

From these beginnings, heart v. has gone on to live an existence in more traditional genres of literature as a colloquial synonym for ‘to love’

Tweeting and blogging and everything in between

I've just been to a lecture on Twitter and digital identity, delivered by Dr Claire Warwick of the Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL and it was interesting to hear different angles on how we create identities online and through microblogging resources like Twitter. Some of it is clearly linguistic - the words we choose to use that reveal something about who we are or the identity we wish to present to others - but other parts of the talk touched on areas that were a bit more sociological: who uses these new media forms, differences between digital natives and newcomers, gender and identity performance.

Claire Warwick mentioned that gender and language was an area they were keen to explore, but it was perhaps a bit disappointing that having been enlightened by Deborah Cameron's brilliant lecture on the Myth of Mars and Venus at the emagazine conference yesterday, I heard the old stereotypes about men doing x and women doing y - even if it is updated for a new medium like Twitter - being repeated.

There may well be some significant gender differences in whether we use @replies, or if we "chat" and/or "tell", but it's probably not helpful to reduce it all to broad generalisations in this way, and maybe more revealing to look at language and identity within genders too.

Anyway, this is only a minor gripe and one I'm sure they'll address when they start their research into the whole area. The lecture was really interesting, particularly for a relatively new tweep (tweeting person? Twitter person?) like me. The lecture is (or soon will be) available from here.

Eleshere, this blog post about the word blog is a good read. We all know about the noun blog being a blend of web + log, but did you know it's being used as an intransitive verb to blog and as a transitive verb to blog something? Here, you can find out more.

ILY. WTF?

You may well be asking WTF? is this blog post about? But when you ask WTF?, do you actually say it out loud, or do you only think it? Is there ever an occasion when you would use it away from a keyboard? And if you do say the letters WTF out loud, do they mean the same thing as the words they stand for (which we all know is What The Flip?) or something a bit less rude? And furthermore, if we type or text these letters should it be WTF? (always with a question mark) or WTF (sometimes without)?

It seems odd to me that anyone would even say double-yew tee eff when they could say whatdaf**k so much more quickly - especially as speed and ease are usually the drivers of change with expressions like this - but if WTF? and what the f**k are actually quite different in meaning, then it makes a bit more sense.

These are important questions because we're increasingly hearing people using initialisms like ILY, OMG (thank you, Usher) and LOL (sometimes pronounced as L-O-L and sometimes as a word that sounds a bit like laaaaawwwwwllllll) and it's got linguists quite excited.

What we often see is the appropriation of words from spoken English into a written vocabulary - and some would argue, a casualisation or colloquialisation of the written word - but it's a bit rarer for words or groups of letters to go from a largely written or blended form into spoken usage. We've seen it on a smaller scale with pwn and n00b, but the more recent examples seem to have taken off among a much bigger part of the population.

In this article by Jocelyn Noveck, several linguists and commentators take a look at what's happening and consider the influence of age on this language use, as well as looking back at the history of acronyms and initialisms in language. It's an interesting read and offers some examples of usage that I'd not heard before (ILY = I love you, for example. Sob.).

Edited on 17.11.11 to change broken link to Noveck piece

I would get NIFOC but PAW

If you know what the title of this blog post means then you should either be ashamed of yourself or get out more. The answer's at the bottom of the post if you want to know*.

Different generations have always created new slang terms and with the massive growth of the internet and other forms of electronic communication, the pace of change has been ramped up another level. As ever, those who aren't young (like me) start to get confused about what the yoot dem are saying and think they're up to no good. And if you look at a site like this one, you'd probably fear the worst: that your son/daughter is engaging in pervy behaviour on a webcam in their room while you're reading the paper and picking your bunions in the living room.

But is the slang of the internet and texting, with all its BRBs and LOLs and ASLs really that different from what different generations used in the past? David Crystal, the bearded God of English Language, thinks not and wrote several chapters in his Txting: the GR8 DB8 about just this. Elsewhere, Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus sees abbreviations in loads of older texts.

*NIFOC = Naked In Front Of Computer
PAW = Parents Are Watching

LOLcats, apps and rickrolling: the language of technology

New technology has always been a major influence on the English language: new inventions spring up and words have to be found to name them. This article on the BBC Technology news site (thanks to Simon Lavery on the English Language List for the link) looks at some of the most recent developments in language - many caused by developments in communications technology - such as weird phenomena like rickrolling, LOLcats and apps.

Net slang

Confused by the nerdy slang your geeky friends use? Can't understand what your teacher is on about when he mumbles about his Level 58 Captain of Gondor pwning the creeps in the Etten raids? Just want to know more words? Then go to this site which has lots of help about such stuff. BRB LOL.

n00bs get pwned

At the root of all internet dialects is leet, the most impenetrable of them all. Leet was what hackers and gamers spoke to each other on bulletin boards back in the 1990s. Since then, it has grown and morphed, hitting a peak in 2005. “Leet”, often spelt “l33t”, is, as mentioned, a phonetic version of the word “elite”, a reference to the technocrats who used it. Leet grew in chat rooms as a means of creating a linguistic in-crowd that excluded uninitiated newcomers, or “n00bs”.

This is how leetspeak (l33tsp34k) is explained by Anna Leach in a fascinating article in yesterday's Independent. With internet slang becoming mainstream and even your granny knowing something about LOLcats and perhaps even having her own level 27 Nightelf hunter in World of Warcraft, the article takes a look at where it's all come from and how it connects to other forms of slang.

As the lexicographer Jonathan Green (speaker at next June's SFX Language workshops, fact fans!) explains "BBC English is what the establishment speaks. Slang is the language that intentionally does the opposite. We are hard-wired as humans to take the piss – we do it politically and socially, and we do it linguistically". And internet slang is very much part of this.

David Crystal (another speaker in June) adds “Fifty years ago, if you invented a word it would take approximately 20 years to get it into the dictionary. Now you can invent something and it’s all over the net in days,” making it clear that while many of the sources of slang are not new - abuse, in-group markers of identity, terms of approval and excitement - that the speed at which they proliferate is something we haven't seen before.

The article goes on to explain how l33t words are often formed and how they are used:

A combination of typos, computer-game references and tech jargon, leet is intentionally baffling. It is also the common ancestor of lolspeak and snark: lolspeak has inherited its linguistic tinkering, while snark has taken on the ethos of the egotistical put-down. “To make leet,” says Kat Hannaford, news editor of T3 magazine’s website, “you manipulate language by adding -xor or -age on the end of words.” Some leet words, such as “w00t” (hooray) and “I have skillz” are becoming mainstream, while other words and phrases reflect the preoccupation of the élite with putting down n00bs, or the analogous pleasure-rush of hacking someone else’s computer system. “Elite speakers are arrogant,” Hannaford says. “There’s a lot of ego in leetspeak.”

Serious pwnage

The internet has speeded up the pace of language change and led to new varieties of English which are often limited to relatively small communities of practice (groups of language users linked by a shared interest or practice, such as online gaming, hacking, phishing, 419 scams etc) but which often leak out into wider society and affect the mainstream.

Many of the words associated with online gaming in particular are interesting from a language change point of view, often consisting of the usual blends, acronyms and initialisms, but also a weird range of semantic changes and random fluctuations and errors which become "real" words in their own right.

One word, the blend playbourer - a person employed to "farm" gold in a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) and then sell it on to other gamers - is reported on in today's BBC News. It's a form of sweatshop labour that fuels a black economy of gold-spammers (people who send you endless spam messages about buying virtual gold with real money) but I can't see a World of Warcraft fairtrade movement springing up any time soon.

Elsewhere terms like owned and pwned have grown in popularity. Owned has a similar meaning to the London slang boyed: defeated, beaten or humiliated. So, to get owned (the passive form of the verb) is is to be beaten. In gaming this seems to refer to any dramatic defeat at the hands of NPC (non-player character) enemies or other players. The obvious link to the traditional sense of to own - to possess or have - suggests that this usage might be seen as a broadening, a form of semantic shift where a word changes its meaning while leaving the original word with its original meaning. And rather like to boy, or even to merk/murk (generally meaning to beat up, destroy or kill, possibly* derived from a shortened version of mercenary, a paid soldier), slang terms with connotations of victory, violence and competitive prowess often move into use in areas of sexual behaviour. Take the recent Dizzee Rascal and Calvin Harris track Dance Wiv Me, which features the romantic chat-up line "You've got a body to die for: let me merk it"...

Pwned is a weirder and maybe more interesting example of how keyboard technology can lead to variations in language use. According to this definition and this one, pwned was probably a typo (with 0 and p being adjacent keys on a QWERTY keyboard) but has now become a word in its own right. A similar example is book to mean cool, created by the predictive text on mobile phones selecting book as the first option. Again, despite originating in a mistake, this has taken off as a slang term (or at least did for a while).

And what do linguists make of this? This week's Word of Mouth on Radio 4 (listen again here) includes an interview with renowned linguist David Crystal who makes the point that the internet is spreading language change so quickly that the days of prescriptivism (the movement to regulate and "fix" spelling, grammar and meaning) are numbered as we let our fingers do the talking.

Useful for:
ENA5/ENGA3 - Language Change
ENGA1 - Language and Mode

*I say possibly as there are loads of different ideas about where this word comes from