O RLY?

As a former editor and proofreader, Internet shorthand drives me crazy. Around 1994, during my early chat days on AOL and a local BBS called City Paper’s CityNet, I remember thinking that using UR and OIC was just ill communication, the lazy chatter’s plague. It was the online equivalent to a bad southern accent; it (unfairly) inferred dumb. (Sorry, Tennessee!)

But that’s changing. Internet language is morphing, creating whole new dialects, the etymology of which is pretty fascinating.

For instance, Leet is a language all on its own, born from gamer/hacker/BBS speak in the 80s. “Teh” (a Qwerty typo we’re all guilty of) and “Pwn” (meaning “to soundly defeat an opponent”) are Leet words that are starting to move beyond their cliquish roots and into the mainstream lexicon. Characters on South Park and in the movie Employee of the Month used “pwned.” And, while not exactly Leet, in 2002 the phrase “All your base are belong to us,” a nonsense expression outside of its original gamer context, was suddenly ubiquitous.

Each niche parcel of the web seems to inspire its own glossary of words and phrases. Social networking sites like MySpace, for instance, spawn language that’s not ungrammatical, but makes sense only in its online context, such as “Thanks for the add” and “Friend me.”

The most recent lingo phenomenon is lolcats language. If you haven’t yet, check out the super awesome lolcats essay that appeared recently on Slate. In it, author Michael Agger attempts to dissect the language:

Blogger Anil Dash wrote about the unusual grammar of lolcats, speculating that it was a “pidgin language, used to help cats talk to humans.” A reader pointed Dash to a San Francisco Chronicle article about MeowChat, where people maintain cat identities online and speak in a cat language that slightly overlaps with lolcat speak. (Genius detail: Some cat lovers disdain MeowChat because it implies that cats are not intelligent, evolved creatures.) Mark Liberman at Language Log posited the best theory, arguing that lolcat was more like kitty baby talk, and cited a 1922 passage from The Clicking of Cuthbert by P.G. Wodehouse: “Little Tinky-Ting don’t need no liver-pad, he don’t,” said Mrs. Luella Mainprice Jopp, addressing the animal in her arms, “because he was his muzzer’s pet, he was.”

I don’t use so much Internet speak in my daily, verbal life. Yet. But I can feel the slang moving from my screen to my mouth every time I say the phrase “BRB.”

PS: NetLingo has a great list of acronyms and shorthand for those of you confused by those precious cell phone commercials.