Friday, March 28, 2008

The evolution of OWNAGE

What stemmed from geeky internet video-game short hand and then later becoming its own online messaging language, "l337 talk", has now become as colloquial in everyday language as words like "cool" and "sick!".

I won't get into the whole lineage of these words, but some of the most common ones are: n00b, suxx0rs, fuxx0red, pr0n and my personal favorite and perhaps the most popular, PWNED. As in, "Damn! You just got your ass PWNED!"

The word pwned didn't just spring up over night, it was an evolutionary process that took years. Here's a rough pedigree of how it came to be:

Owned - "Dude, you just got owned by that sniper with a head shot."
Ownage - "That game was pure ownage!"
Pwned - "Wow! That guy crossing the street just got pwned by that car!"
Pwnage - "World of Warcraft is pwnage!"

Now, it has been a few years since an evolutionary step forward for this particular family of descriptive words with an ascending level of magnitude. As of right now, getting "PWNED" is the highest order of magnitude you can go while staying within this family of l337 descriptors.

Hence I will make my personal mark in the world of l337 talk. From now on, when something is so awesome that 'pwned' is no longer sufficient, the next (and highest) level up is HWNED!

Derived from HOned and HOnage and eventually becoming HWNED and HWNAGE.
Usage will be the exact same, but the order of magnitude is now roughly 10 fold that of 'pwned'.

Here are some typical usages for the word HWNED:

"Yo, that new Lambo is pure HWNAGE!" or "Bro, your new shoes just got HWNED by that pile of shit!"

Of course there is one event that automatically warrants the use of this word, and that is if you have previously slept with me, are sleeping with me now, or anyone that will sleep with me in the future, you have in essence been HWNED to the highest degree! There is no exception to this rule.*



*No exception!

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