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SPELLING AND GRAMMAR- INTERNET EDITION- The world after 1337

Just a quick post today. Spelling is a useful skill to have. Maybe its not as useful as using your quadcore PC with two graphics cards in SLi config to play Quake III in 2009, but it does do one very necessary thing (apart from making clear what it is you are writing/typing). It separates the tards from the rest of us. Sure, we’ve all accidentally typed ‘teh’ instead of ‘the,’ but there are thousands of guys who do it deliberately so we know how cool they are.

You can also use this list to explain these terms to your Wiimote waving grandparents.

Pwned is an interesting word. (I know because its in my online handle ClivePwned). Its pronounced owned, as in the hacking term. On a Qwerty keyboard, P is next to O and so pwned has become the internet’s way to saying “Oh gosh, I’ve won this rally. Jolly good show.”

‘Should of.’ This is one that flies under many people’s radar. Instead of using should have as in “I should have paid attention in school” or used the contraction should’ve, people are now typing should of. Despite this making no sense, it is now commonplace, just like AIDS. Just as the spread of AIDS makes it a reality to those who haven’t contracted it, so too does the use of  should of instead of should have as a reality for those literacy level is greater than that of

Rediculous. Despite the existence of spell checkers, predictive text and education, people add a superfluous letter E to replace the primary I in the word ridiculous. Why is this a big deal? Because the concept of ridicule only works if the ridiculer is able to articulate an argument belittling the object of intended ridicule without undermining the argument with spelling errors. Saying “this recession is rediculous” completely undermines your argument because you cannot spell. If you wrote “this recession is ridiculous,” then I would wholeheartedly agree with you. wat?

Prolly. This is a bastardisation of the word probably. This is what happens when Probably goes out and gets a little bit too  drunk for her own good and wakes up the next morning with a hangover and a $50 bill wrapped around a bottle of morning after pills on the nightstand.

There is/are Now this is a weird error that almost everyone makes everyday. I’m one of them. There is: used to describe one thing. There are: used to describe many. “There is many ways to do this is wrong.” It should be “There are many ways to do this.” It is abused by us all.

1337 speak has faded  a lot since its heyday at the turn of the millennium. There is probably still the odd fuckwit writing R0x0R in emails. Do you say LOL out loud with other geek-minded friends? I used ‘LOL’ ironically once in front of someone I’d just met at E3 one year and got a quizzical look back at me as if I were a main character from an off-Broadway production of  ‘Of Mice and Men’ and I was standing over the freshly squeezed corpse. Of course I’m using English spellings on this blog so you may ROFL at my use of non-US spelling conventions.

We could get into the proper use of its and it’s, who and whom, and of course passer-bys or passers-by. But this is a videogame blog dammit and all your base, yada, yada, yada. What gets your goat up about the way people write these days? Pointless articles like this, anyone?

Anyway tomorrow we have something more relevant to gaming and less relevant to Spelling Nazis, Grammar Gestapo and other people with assorted levels of StickUpTheButtedness.

Edited: because Clint found an error. Owned is not a wrestling term, its a hacking term. I bow to the master.