Microsoft has published a hilariously serious introduction to “computer slang”.
While it’s important to respect your children’s privacy, understanding what your teenager’s online slang means and how to decipher it is important as you help guide their online experience. While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short. Leet (a vernacular form of “elite”) is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically?creating the digital equivalent of pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics.
Another page discusses “10 tips for dealing with griefers“:
Known as griefers, snerts, cheese players, twinks, or just plain cyberbullies, chances are that a kid near you has been bothered by one of these ne’er-do-wells at least once while playing online multiplayer video games such as Halo 2, EverQuest, The Sims Online, SOCOM, and Star Wars Galaxies. Griefers are the Internet equivalent of playground bullies, who find fun in embarrassing and pushing around others.
Not sure what to think about this – it’s all completely earnest and actually useful for the uninitiated, but just with a 1950’s innocence and Microsoft blue colors in the menus. What has the world come to?
Cyber bullies? Way to merge my two all time worst hated words together in one phrase. Uhg. When I got picked on at school, I refused to tell any teachers about it because “I’m being abused” is too strong a term and “I’m being bullied” is too silly.
And “Cyber”? Ahk, don’t get me started!
Damnit, now I have to go and kill fucking everything.
I guess your primary annoyance is “buzzword bullies”?
If that refers to people who cruelly taunt buzzwords and buzzword users, then I’m all for them. Those guys can move down a few places on my “kill everything” list.
I think theory griefers should be next on the list. A theory griefer is a theorist whose work only explains why everybody else’s work is naive and futile.
… and always seems to imply that they have the right answer, but they’re too busy to tell you it. Condescending mutts!
Wow! I am compiling a list of people to kill with Jesper Juul! I’m pretty sure I had a dream about this one time.