The Meme Textbook Part 2: The Language of the Internet | Page 4

The Language of
the Internet
The Internet has effectively created its own
languages and grammar, often referred to as
cyber-slang, netspeak, or chatspeak. In addi-
tion to shortening phrases and replacing let-
ters with similar sounds, internet slang adds
images and short animations, new syntaxes and
terminology, and the incorporation of words
from languages other than English, such as
the Japanese word ‘weeaboo’ which means an
anime and manga fanatic. The way the lan-
guage of the internet has evolved is intrinsic
to understanding internet memes since they
so often overlap. A number of internet ‘dia-
lects’ have also evolved, both as memes and
as the accepted canon of internet grammar.
Acronyms
As texting hit the mainstream due to the avail-
ability of mobile phones, new acronyms also
started being used. Much like telegraphs, short-
hand language and acronyms existed to shorten
the number of letters necessary to communi-
cate. However many of these still exist today
and have been incorporated into contemporary
internet vocabulary. The most common is prob-
ably lol (laugh out loud). Rofl (rolling on
the floor laughing) and lmao (laughing my ass
off ) were combined to create rotflmao (roll-
ing on the floor laughing my ass off ). Rofl has
faded into the history of the internet, although
lol and lmao are still used. There are a num-
ber of spelling variations, much in line with
leet speak, such as lulz rather than lol. Kek is
another equivalent for lol common on 4chan
which originated from a Turkish brand of pack-
aged muffins known as Topkek, or “top kek,”
4 | Part Two: The Language of the Internet
meaning something is very funny. Art made of
ascii characters became a meme in the early
2000s. Ascii stands for American Standard
Code for Information Interchange and it
ascribes numbers to each character of English
writing so a computer, which can only inter-
pret numbers, can read them. For example, the
lowercase ‘a’ has the ascii value 97 in decimal
(0x61 in hexedecimal) and the uppercase ‘A’ has
the ascii value 65 in decimal (0x41 in hexa-
decimal). Roflcopter was an animated ascii
art of a helicopter with the blades reading rofl
and lol. (Fig. 2) It became popular initially as
a single-serving website, but the phrase “rofl-
copter,’”meaning something was very funny,
became popular around 2003 with players of the
massive multiplayer online role playing game
(mmorpg) World of Warcraft. There was also
a flash game released where the user played as
the roflcopter shooting ‘rofling guns’ at the
enemy ‘lollerskaters.’ There were a number of
other wordplay jokes in the game, such as shoot-
ing ‘omgmissiles’ and ‘wtfbombs.’ Since the
early 2000s, the phrase has faded to obscurity.
Leet Speak
1337 speak, or leet speak, began in the 1980’s as
a way for hackers to prevent their websites from
being found by keyword searches. It became
popular in the 1990’s with the advent of online
multiplayer games, such as Doom, where being
called a h4x0r (hacker) meant they were to be
feared. Leet is short form of ‘elite’ and being
called leet suggests they are highly skilled at the
game. Specific grammar existed in leet speak
such as dropping the ‘e’ in words ending in ‘-ed’
such as ‘pwned’ (owned) turning into ‘pwnd,’ the
addition of ‘-ness’ or ‘-age’ to create new verbs
and adjectives respectively, such as ‘pwnage’ or
‘leetness,’ and using double numbers to represent
the long vowel sound, such as in ‘j00’ (you) or
‘d00d’ (dude). Although leet speak is generally