by Raphael Luckom
10/17/2008 8:42:00 AM
Slate just published an article about why everyone is saying "fail" all of a sudden, which gets almost exactly 75% of its facts right. In that direction, I present to you a brief glossary of what the kids on the internet are saying these days:
Teh, taht :alternate spellings of the words "the," and "that," respectively, for comic effect, i.e. "dude, taht bike is teh awesome"
The construction of an article follwed by an adjective, "nouning" the adjective i.e. "teh awesome" : whatever the meaning of the adjective is, although the article is almost always "the," or "teh." Popular constructions include "teh awesome" and "teh suck"
sXe : not actually internet slang, it's a contraction of straight-edge, a commitment to not use drugs or alcohol.
FTW: For The Win, i.e. "Red Sox FTW"
USE OF CAPS LOCK: makes everything funny.
Interwebz, intarwubz, inferweb, etc: ironic spellings of "internet"--the connotation being that people make way to big a deal out of what's become a truly basic technology.
-zorz or -z0rz: usually used as a suffix of "pwn" or "own." Adds emphasis. "Dude, you just got pwnz0rd." This is falling into disuse.
1337: pronounced "leet" : the gamer alphabet composed of numbers and symbols.
Indiscriminate use of the letter "z": emphasis, also sets tone, i.e. "dudez this is teh awesome"
There are a lot more out there, and UrbanDictionary.com has done a far better job than I could of collecting and defining them. In conclusion, I'd just like to point out that what's emerging here is a new iteration of the ironic tense, which saw a recent incarnation in the "bad means good" of the 80s and 90s. It's characterized by the way it confoms to the worst stereotypes of what geeks are supposed to be like (introverted math and CS people with no sense of grammar or usage) and by the constant implication of hilarity where the uninitiated see none. Your homework: tell me why the phrase "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG" is funny, using at least one example.