WORDPLAY
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 21, 2009
A FEW Mondays ago, ABC viewers were treated to a spelling lesson. Our teacher was Jonathon Holmes, host of Media Watch, who stared down the barrel of camera 1 and said: "That's P-W-N-E-D. And I didn't know the word either, until I started using Twitter. I rather like it. If you want to know what it means, visit our website."So I did, even though my 14-year-old son taught me the word a year back. He's been pwning me for months in Wii golf. Mind you, Finn pronounces the word the same as "owning" rather than Holmes's "poning". Either way, I'm trounced by the ninth hole.On the Media Watch website, "pwn" enjoyed its own linked footnote, an excerpt from urbandictionary.com, which defined the word as being totally defeated by your opponent, or owned. Legend insists the verb derives from the constant slip of gamers' fingers, trying to spell a rapid "own" on their keyboard and tapping out "pwn" instead.Other theories exist, speculating the word is a blend of owned and power, or perfect, or pistol, where a player in a game such as Halo 3 or World of Warcraft outshoots his foe despite carrying an inferior weapon.Whichever source holds good, the vowel-free weirdness of "pwn" is due to a growing English slang called leet, also known as eleet, leetspeak or even the weirder 1337, being an upside-down LEET in numerical form, much as my old calculator once spelt BIG BOOBS.Hackers and gamers are the prime speakers. Writers, I should say, since this tribe favours quick-fire online exchanges versus face-time, like pre-Twitter tweeting using emoticons, computer scripts and trippy shorthand such as "pwned", "pwn'd" and "pwnage" to get their brags across. Logically the dialect keeps the clubhouse airtight.Yet not so tight the place can't be raided. Mainstream English has already filched phishing from the leet glossary, with other words such as "skillz" and "noob" (a gaming newbie) and that evil snigger "kekeke" in easy reach. But our latest prize is "pwn".Of course, the word is now compromised by prime-time use and every leetspeaker in cyberspace will ditch "pwn" like last week's prawns. That's assuming we lay speakers can agree on how to pronounce it.Holmes himself reckons "There ain't no such thing as a correct pronunciation. Maybe ... it's just not to be spoken." Pone or own: that is the question. As authorities go, I'm more inclined to listen to a teen with a sweet seven iron than a bloke who's nearer my vintage.Saying that, if PWN the numberplate hasn't been grabbed, a sick Dad could do a lot worse for Christmas. In the meantime, I'm going back to my virtual driving range.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
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