pown

I was playing online poker for a moment today while waiting for my computer and someone won a few hands and typed "I pown p*****s like you."

Now... bravado and hubris aside.... if you're going to try to use a hip slang word - at least spell it right. 

pwn is the word.  Once upon a time in some online game room, somoene probably meant to say "You were owned!"  and typed the neighboring key and wrote "You were pwned."  And somehow this caught on.  However, if you write "pown" - you're just making stuff up.

At what point can we just make up our own language as we go before it becomes nonsensical.

Some people have vast vocabularies and use abstract words that no one probably knows.  Are those words actually communicating anything other than the user's lingual superiority? 

Certain culture (like gamers) wil invent their own lexicon partly for functionality, partly for fun. 

As more and more of our communication becomes typed, will we begin to invent more words like "pwn" which is a word that most people would not know how  to pronounce.  There is, in fact, only one other word in the English language that uses "w" as a vowel - and that is "cwm" - what it means isn't important because no one uses it unless you're working with geology and then it is part of your nomenclature (set of words you use to describe things in your field).  But the pronunciation is "coom" which suggests that "pwn" would not be "pown" but "poon."

Now, "poon" is a totally different slang word which would make the thought of gamers telling eachother they "pooned" eachother quite surreal, odd, and ironic in a way.  Also odd because while the chatroom bleeped out the word he used against us, he was basically being redundant with the correct pronunciaions.....  he said, "I pown p*****s like you."

Perhaps even more odd is that this slang word actually derives from a word that is in the dictionary "pudendum" which is the "external genital of a human being" but mostly of a woman.

What's odd is not, though, that a perfectly usable word was slanged to create a brand new word, but where this word comes from - It comes from the latin word pudére.... which means....   to be ashamed.

It's sad yet unsurprising that this would be the original source for a word which lables the sexual organs of human beings.  I think that this type of shame actually leads to a tremendous amount of problems in all societies because of fear and repression.  People in conflict with what they think and what they think they're supposed to be thinking.  Sometimes repression of what one thinks can turn it into an obsession which makes a casual thought into something dangerous.

And the final irony is to think of what gamers are doing when they are using the phrase "I pwn you!"

They're shaming the other players.

This concludes my rather cyclical though potentially pointless waxing philosophic on the random typing of someone in a poker room online.