Many Linguists say that it is not Mankind’s use of tools that distinguishes him from the Animals, but its use of Language that truly defines us as Human Beings. According to Linguistics Theorists, Language can control your world view, by dictating the structure and understanding of meanings in our World. Our use of language reveals a great deal about us, like what culture we come from, and even what sub-culture we come from.
From the Bible, we get the word Shibboleth, which, in its modern meaning, signifies a “code word” , where by its correct (or more importantly incorrect) use can identify you as a member of a certain group.
When I discovered Linux and Unix in the late 90’s, and began to learn programming, I imagined myself as a hacker, and immersed myself in the language of hacker culture. One of the ways you could tell a n00b, was by how they said “pwned”. If they said it as “poned” you knew they were a total n00b. As a hacker you would have known that it derived from a meme, and that it was intended to be “owned”, and that was part of the humor of its use, so the correct pronunciation of “pwned” was “owned”. All was well in H4X0rland. Then the internet struck. Thanks in part to the miraculous creation of Mr. William Gates at Microsoft, anyone and their grandmother can get on the Internet. Millions and Millions of people logged on to the interwebs, MMORPG’s, Gaming Networks, and “pwned” started making the rounds. All of a sudden I started seeing pwned all over the internet and YouTube, being pronounced wrong. There were gamers, celebrities, and TV personalities saying pwned as “poned”.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhb89V43KWc&w=420&h=315]
In almost no time at all our word was taken from us. Hackers, who had discovered and nurtured this meme into a sub-cultural Shibboleth, were now a vanishingly insignificant minority. Millions of people who weren’t even old enough to know what Unix was, now had “pwned” as part of their vernacular, and by the power of Democracy, we, the creators of the word, were now wrong about its correct pronunciation. In short, we were poned.
Now, I read this article by a writer at the Guardian, crying and moaning about how the meaning, use, and definition of the word ‘Literally’ has been changed, due in no small part to the Democratization (read Corruption?) of Language by the Internet. The definition has been expanded to now include…
“to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling”.
So now, when someone says to you “I have not eaten in literally a million years”, they are not technically wrong.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlWZ3mODJA&w=420&h=315]
So the above joke, from Big Bang Theory, is now meaningless. At times like these I get frustrated, I toy with the notion of un-plugging from the internet, and just going up to the mountains to raise chickens. Welcome to the Internet!