A Guide To Some Internet Slang

Added: 10/01/2006
The abundance of internet slang is a prime example of how the internet has affected our culture, going so far as to affect the very way we speak. Some words, like email, that originally started as slang have become so prevalent that they are now considered proper words, and with a generation of people growing up with internet slang in their everyday vocabulary, its not difficult to imagine a time soon when many of the words we currently consider slang are accepted as proper English.

In our modern media, and in our modern workplace, internet slang is everywhere. Every few months or so, a new word seems to enter the lexicon, and a column in newspapers or magazine outlining the current fads in jargon internet is familiar to most media consumers. There are many a slang dictionary online, naturally, and much the jargon used is explained here. In many ways we have jargon internet to explain all these terms. Most internet slang begins from acronyms used in online messaging. The habit originates from the shorthand required both to save time, and to fit on the small screens - cell phones, personal organizers, often used for sending text messages. An example is the acronym 'lol' used to mean 'laughing out loud' or 'laugh out loud.'

Looking at any number of slang dictionaries online, definitions are easy to find. Here's a random sampling of some internet slang:

AFAIK - "as far as I know"

AFK - "away/absent from keyboard," usually in the form in one's handle.

AIM - "AOL Instant Messenger"

ASAP - "as soon as possible"
 
ATTN - "Attention"

B4N - "Bye for now"

B7 - "Banned" - A derivation of B&, minus the shift key.

BFN - "Bye for now"

Blog - Short for "weblog," often used as a verb, as in "I was blogging today."

BRB - "Be right back"

BRT - "Be right there"

Bump - A reference to the resurrection of an old thread to the top of the page in messageboards. It stands for Bring Up My Post.

EULA - End-User License Agreement

ETA - "Estimated Time of Arrival"

FAQ  - Frequently Asked Question(s), or a list of frequently-asked questions with their answers.

FLOABT - "for lack of a better term"

IMO  - "In my opinion"

IMAO - "In my arrogant opinion"

IMHO - "In my humble opinion," or "in my honest opinion"

INMP -  "It's not my problem"

IOW  -  "In other words"

Phew. And that's barely taken us to the letter "I". As we can see, there is an absolute plethora of internet jargon out there, and it would take a lifetime to understand it all (though based at the young age that children start using at, maybe some people will know all these words in their old age.)

The internet slang above applies mostly to instant messaging, but there are more common words that sneak into everyday language with the user rarely thinking of it as slang. Besides email which we have already mentioned, in recent years one of the most common pieces of internet slang is the word 'google' used as a verb, derived, of course, from the ubiquitous search engine. Today it is not at all uncommon for someone far removed from an internet geek to refer to the fact that they 'googled something', or if a question is asked to reply 'just google it.'

As if there were not enough ways that the internet effects change our lives, we can see by looking at internet slang that it sometimes changes the very way we speak. When looking at the terms like 'email' and 'google', we see that these words are not the technical jargon used only by heavy computer users, but the common words used by everyday people around the home or office. As more pieces of internet slang get added to our vocabularies every day, we can only imagine how much of our lexicon will be taken up with it in the future.

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