pwned!
The Hitchhiker's e-guide to rare-vocabulary (of which i am one of the secret editors) has a ridiculously large collection of rarely used words, phrases, metaphors and downright foul language, stored on a remarkably innocent looking computer with a 128kb hard drive and a highly advanced compression software (which is also the only known software in the known universe that can compress itself). The machine has no official name, though it is fondly referred to by its occasional users as "We'll-ask-for-this-crap-when-we-need-it" (WAFTCWWNI).
One of the latest entrants to the hallowed kilobytes of this collection is the verb pwned (also see pwnage (noun)).
The guide has the following to say about the word:
" Pwning is a highly popular term used on the earth.wide.web. The most accurate definition available is: totally dominating, over-powering, destroying or doing certain other nasty things to someone or something you probably don't like all that much.
e.g: "I totally pwned the other players this morning in counterstrike! I pwn that game!"
The verb pwned is believed to have originated from the more familiar (though not necessarily more popular) verb owned. A closer, more careful look will reveal that the two words really differ only in their first letter. This has led literary scholars and other people on the web with nothing better to do, to hypothesize that the new word is, in fact, a result of a typing error (known as typos by some uber-cool earthlings). The reason cited for the error is the proximity of the letters p and o on standard keyboards.
Most evidence suggests that the people responsible for the error, are users of the popular windows operating system, mainly because they are so large in number and also because they are...well...really really dumb (the windows OS is known to have a numbing effect on the human brain, as proved by a study on lab rats, which, when exposed to the OS for long hours, began to wait for a 'yes/no' dialog window every time they needed to take a crap....but we digress).
The reader is advised to go ahead, use the word in as many contexts as possible and figure out for him/herself why its in such popular usage today."
One of the latest entrants to the hallowed kilobytes of this collection is the verb pwned (also see pwnage (noun)).
The guide has the following to say about the word:
" Pwning is a highly popular term used on the earth.wide.web. The most accurate definition available is: totally dominating, over-powering, destroying or doing certain other nasty things to someone or something you probably don't like all that much.
e.g: "I totally pwned the other players this morning in counterstrike! I pwn that game!"
The verb pwned is believed to have originated from the more familiar (though not necessarily more popular) verb owned. A closer, more careful look will reveal that the two words really differ only in their first letter. This has led literary scholars and other people on the web with nothing better to do, to hypothesize that the new word is, in fact, a result of a typing error (known as typos by some uber-cool earthlings). The reason cited for the error is the proximity of the letters p and o on standard keyboards.
Most evidence suggests that the people responsible for the error, are users of the popular windows operating system, mainly because they are so large in number and also because they are...well...really really dumb (the windows OS is known to have a numbing effect on the human brain, as proved by a study on lab rats, which, when exposed to the OS for long hours, began to wait for a 'yes/no' dialog window every time they needed to take a crap....but we digress).
The reader is advised to go ahead, use the word in as many contexts as possible and figure out for him/herself why its in such popular usage today."
posted by Prashant Pawan at
12:17 PM
|
7 Comments
