IVL

Friday, September 16, 2005

OMG! FDL!

Typing is a pain in the ass. The typos, the misspelled words, bad grammar - all of that is exacerbated when you come online and begin chatting. Granted your typing speed will pick up and you might progress from the 'hunt and peck' type to 'manic secretary' as you become more proficient. But speed does not a typist make.

Ok but you didn't plunk down your money on broadband just to improve your mad typing skillz. You wanted to meet people from all over the world and converse with them. The problem is that doing so requires you to damn near learn a new language.

Internet-speak is replete with acronyms, abbreviations and slang. It's just faster to type 'lol' than to actually spell 'laugh out loud.' (And if you want to laugh at me, I just typo'd three times while trying to spell out 'laugh out loud.')

Other acronyms such as, 'OMG,' STFU' (a personal fave), and 'FDL' all have their place in chat programs like messengers, IRC chats or even old telnet chats like this one where I've been an admin for over nine years. They facilitate conversation in a world where speaking out loud just doesn't happen. You are solely dependent on text to convey your meaning, tone and intent, all in real-time. So you end a sentence with a smilie ( :) or :( or :P ) to convey your tone. Or you might find yourself in an environment with several other people at once and the text scroll on your screen will be flying by all Matrix-like and if you don't keep up, you're going to be ignored.

Words are often distorted as well. 'Probably' becomes 'prolly,' 'program' becomes 'proggy,' and 'address' is 'addy.' I don't know why, or how those came about but I've used them.

If you want to explore this phenomenon, Wikipedia has a very good explanation of Internet slang. In fact, Wikipedia is pretty damn cool itself so spend some time there and poke around.

In other words, RTFM.

Written by atomicweightofcheese @ 6:49 PM ||

OMG! FDL!

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