July 2002

Slangsters
By Beeb Ashcroft

Before I went on the Internet for the first time, I read "Yellow Ranger's Guide to the WWW" - an article in a kid's fan club magazine, which had the Power Ranger giving children advice on how to use the Internet. Besides the usual "Don't take virtual candy from strangers, kids!”, there was a glossary of abbreviations supposedly used by those "in the know". I ripped the article out and kept it with me, thinking I would need it to have any clue what was being said. This is the problem with any guide to Net slang - it's usually a giant list, which gives you the impression that people commonly type sentences like, "WYSIWYG, IMHO. ROFLMAO! BRB!"

But in reality, there's only a handful of phrases which people use with any regularity, most being short and pretty much self-explanatory. Same thing goes for emoticons - Half the time people can't even be bothered to give their smileys a nose, let alone type out #[|;~*)>.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been confused by net slang before. The one which bemused me the longest was <3 , which is supposed to represent a heart. But I’ve been in the online X-Files fan community for a long time, and one of the villain’s nicknames is “Ratboy”; hence, his fans would often use <3~ to symbolize a rat. So, a sentence reading “I <3 Britney Spears!!!!!!” would garner little more than a “…huh?” from me. I still think it looks far more like a rat face than a heart…

Another interesting thing I discovered is that there are Asian variations of smileys which read quite differently - ^_^ for :-), (;_;) for :`-(, and so on. These kinds of smileys are especially popular with teenage anime fangirls.

A guide to Asian smileys can be found here: http://www.spunkyworld.com/cobra/smiley.html; and if, you’re interested in learning more about net slang in general, then check out netlingo.com. And in case you’ve ever spent sleepless nights wondering, “If I was an Internet slang term, which one would I be?”, then look no further: a personality test can be found at http://internetslang.dot.nu/, so that you may discover your Inner Slang Term. :-)