Geekspeak, jargon, IRCtalk and suits language are spreading through the world's slang faster and faster via the Internet. It now takes days for a joke to cross the world, while back in the 1960s it took months; and Marco Polo's generation was probably falling around at the shaggy dog stories that had cracked up the Vikings a world and half a millennium away.
In the same way, slang is changing the language so quickly that even the underlying grammatical structure of English is shaken by it. It started with geekspeak. The techies who first used the intranet between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford, CMU, Rutgers, Helsinki University of Technology, Cambridge (England), XEROX PARC and the other centres of Hackish, developed their own shorthand. As others joined what eventually became the Internet, the shorthand developed into a language that seeped into the surrounding slang.
Bizarre world-view
The language loosely known as Hackspek or Hackish is now moving out from English to infect other languages with its bizarre world-view and syntactical conventions, so that Spaniards talk about hackar - to hack - and French users say ping a moi - "ping me" ("run a short program to see how quickly our computers are connecting").
The phreaks and crackers who graze on the fringes of nerd society have their own language, spelling and grammar, and this jokey syntax is making its way into the mainstream. Crackers, phone phreaks and warez d00dz are, respectively, people (boys in the main) who hack into other people's computer systems, people who hack the phone system to get free international calls, and people who swap copies of software which has been edited to take out the copyright protection.
Their slang is almost completely written - reflecting their main way of communicating: underground bulletin boards or BBSs. It is, says Eric S. Raymond's hilarious New Hacker's Dictionary (MIT Press), heavily influenced by skateboard and underground-rock lingo. Phreakers misspell playfully - always fone for phone and phreak for freak, always z in plurals - codez, warez - and use k for emphasis - k-kool, k- rad (radical), k-awesome.
There is, in fact, a whole subculture of slang which is written rather than spoken, coming from the Internet and BBSs' world of typed, anonymous communication. (Why do people keep saying the Internet is putting an end to literacy? Are they mad?)
New spelling On IRC (Internet Relay Chat), where people type text into windows to be read and answered by others who are using the same channel from around the world, a new convention of spelling has grown up.
Abbreviations are used and understood by consensus, in a medium where people flash on for five minutes to hear the news and disappear again: ppl for people, cya for see you, ic for I see, rofl for rolling on the floor laughing, lol for lotsa laughs, btw for by the way. There's also the Hackspek convention of sprightly use of numerals for letters: cu l8r for see you later, b4 for before, any1 for anyone. Confusingly enough, the numerals aren't always used to represent their sounds; sometimes they're used to replace lookalike letters: spe4k l1ke a g3ek. IRC-heads are liable to tell some1 spending too much time online that they're c4augHt iN tH3 sPYd3rs w3B. It's not as twee as it sounds; IRC is where the news of Tiananmen Square came through, and of the Kuwait invasion, and there's always a sense of haste and passion there, even in the most relaxed faffing around.
Harder-edged geekspeak, the techie slang that's coming into the real language, expresses an ironic, relaxed view of the world, and a certainty of where the speaker's place in the world is.
That place is absolutely not one of the suits - the business people, some of whom are even droids, who follow rules and official procedures blindly (supermarket checkout clerks, civil servants, in nerdish worldview), or worse still, marketroids, who market the geeks' ideas.
Geeks, of course, were originally ppl who bit the heads off chickens and drank their blood to entertain the customers at travelling shows. The trendoids of the 1960s used the term to condemn unfashionable youths who spent time in techno-nerd mode. The word's modality changed till it became the proud badge of techie craft and power it now is.
Geeks object strongly to the misuse of the term hacker to denote phreaks or crackerz: a hacker is a good coder in their lexicon. They call computer criminals crackers, or dark-side hackers, and consider them major lusers. They're fighting a losing semantic battle over the word, though. As they listen to the whalesong of their modems, grokking the code they're temporarily kludging, they should just ignore the wibbling of the mundane.
Alternative world Wibbling, of course, is persiflage, pointless chatter. The mundane is the other world inhabited by suits, or alternatively the world one enters when going home and washing the dishes and doing home things. Grokking, from Robert A. Heinlein's sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land, is entering into a perfect emotional conjunction with something so you understand it fully. Hey, suits bite the bag (fail horribly) anywayz, m4n.
Verbing is an important part of the syntax - the playful manufacture of verbs from nouns, not to be confused with the suits' ignorant version of the same thing. The prototypical verbing is, of course, to pro- gram, meaning for to write a program. The language is also finding new adverbs - "he thought it was the studly thing to do" - and abstracts - mysteriosity, obviosity, hackification, winnitude (the quality of wonderful success, also used as an exclamation: Winnitude!) Eric S. Raymond, compiler of the New Hacker's Dictionary, posits that "English as a whole is already heading towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese; hackers are simply a bit ahead of the curve."