Monday, July 7, 2008

OMG U SUK, jk LMAO. BRB, MOS (Need translators)

I recently discovered a new language. As an anthropologist, it's what I do. When I'm not busy keepin' it real with the lemurs, I am constantly on the lookout for archaeological dig sites, the missing link, and piecing together new and/or dead languages.

So you can only imagine my surprise and excitement when I recently discovered a new language on the rise. At first, I thought this language was confined only to the written word. Fortunately though, I have begun to hear it outside of internet forums and instant messaging chatrooms.

The language is so rudimentary that it has been a difficult process of transcribing it into English. The lack of vowels and supporting consonants make it seem as though it was conceived by a retarded child on crack. I thought I had made some real progress when I found that a vast majority of the words are actually abbreviations, only to discover that the consistencies in this theory were lacking.

For every capitalized (to convey excessive emotion, or just the error of a fool?) abbreviation, there was another example of someone just fat-fingering their writing apparatus. This distinction--or lack thereof, really--makes it hard to attribute meaning to a four letter lexical unit with no indication of what stands for what.

Does "TTYL" contain four individual morphemes; if so, how many are bound and how many are free? Is "LOL" a verb, noun, adjective, or some demonic synthesis of the three? And this doesn't even consider the possibilities that L33t speek adds to the mix.

Suffice it to say, our language is being subjugated by the interwebs, and there is nuthing u can do abot it! Al ur wordz r blong 2 us!

RUN!!! Save yourselves!!!!

2 comments:

A Wanderer's Heart said...

So you've actually heard this in everyday speech?

generic Brand said...

You mean you haven't heard someone just randomly say "OMG", "LOL", or "JK" in speech as opposed to what the acronym stands for?