The Rusty Machete of Anti-Grammar

*casts resurrect on Rawr-Zebra*
"I live once more!" -- Mal'Ganis (Warcraft 3)

And so does this blog, he said to the roaring applause from all his fans.
*tumble weed goes by*
Right, well let's cultivate some readers.

So there I was, minding my own business, after I had just written an article for the school's newspaper thing. When I get a response from a friend I just sent it to for proof reading. She said Haha, awesome. I love it, and then said, That's it. I'm writing a blog.
And with that she drew me into to reviving this one.

So, onto The Rusty Machete of Anti Grammar!!!

While procrastinating instead of writing this (already 2 weeks late) article, I was hurting my thumb and sending my airtime balance into the red. Most of you who can relate to this, know about “text speak”. It is thought to have originally started with the fact that there is a 160 character limit, well with my network anyway, in the text messages and with the desire to say as much as possible, people started to hack away at the English language with The Rusty Machete of Anti Grammar. This invented the use of Shorten My Sentences, more commonly known as SMS. People would replace ate with 8 , for example I am l8 (late) , or I h8 (hate) machetes .

This carried through most of the alphabet as “for” became “4”, “the” became “da” and my personal favourite butchering being “cya” (see you).

Of course I am not blameless at all. Who wants to pay the price for two messages when you could just cut off a few unsuspecting words and half your costs?

N E wai, this dialect has spread amongst the teenage populace and can be seen written where there isn’t even a word limit.

However, another, arguably more skilful use of characters to replace letters, is 1337 speak. What is one-three-three-seven speak? Well it’s not numbers at all. Each number represents a letter. So you actually read it leet speak. It was developed by internet gamers who didn’t have a character limit, but rather had to send messages quickly or risk losing their base to the enemy, a terrible thought.

Leet is short for elite, as it was first used as an adjective for gamers self-proclaiming their awesomeness at shooting each other. The most basic use is substituting letters with symbols, such as @14n71c (Atlantic) or 4/\/\4z1n9 (amazing). One person’s interpretation of a symbol can differ from another’s however.

Nevertheless, there are some standard acronyms that are in the language; arguably the most well known being lol. LOL stands for laughing out loud and basically represents laughter in text form. Intentional misspelling of words seems to make someone more leet . Common ones are teh (the) and joo (you) and rawr (roar). One that could be considered as a misspelling is pwn (er, pawn?). Presumably when some hot shot was typing so fast to protect his base his finger slipped while we was typing own (which is leet for dominate, superior etc., i.e. “I owned him”) and hit the P key by mistake. This caught on quickly with his buddies and so word spread that own got pwned .

Another saying is roxxorz my soxxorz / boxxorz (rocks my socks/boxers). This probably has nothing at all to do with the state of your underwear but is generally used to show great satisfaction with something. noob / n00b / newb is the term applied to a newbie or just someone who has little to no skill at the game at all. The greatest form of owning takes place when a noob , for instance, kills a really high level player. This roxxorz many people’s soxxorz and sends lol's all round. Normally the veteran can shrug it off and say, "n00b got a lucky shot" and then the other old wisened sages (with RPG's) nod in agreement.

However, in most cases in life we don’t have a 160 limit on all that we write. So just write it out in full and don’t cut it down. Kkthxbai!