Grouchy Old Librarian

I’m in charge of a Wii game night for tweens at the library. The other night, I got to sit in a dark room with 7 kids who were NOT using their library voices. They make me feel old. To them, I’m a grouchy old librarian. I’m not young enough to be cool.

So throughout the night, kids kept using a word that sounded like “pone.” As in, “You just got poned!” This sounded familiar to something I’d seen online, so I looked it up on one of my faithful sidekicks, Wikipedia, to see what it was all about.

As I found out, the word is “pwn.” It means “own,” as in, to dominate your opponent. It’s a term used mostly in online gaming.

But guess what? It started out as the word “own,” until it got spelled wrong. Apparently, this is because “o” and “p” are right next to each other on the keyboard. That’s right; here we have a new word that came about as a result of a MISSPELLING!

That’s a little frightening to me. Now hey, I’m all in favor of new words. I admitted my love for “googling,” and, though I think certain words introduced by pop culture can be kind of silly, it’s still fascinating to think that the English language is always changing.

But seriously? Is this what we’ve come to? New words are going to be used because people are too sloppy to spell things correctly?

Our language will change and evolve and that’s all natural and good. But a couple of us grouchy old people like to hold onto SOME rules.

Okay, that’s my rant for the day. And don't anyone try to debate me on this, because I will pwn you.