LOL!!!!!1

C: I like to verb words

H: What?

C: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when access was a thing? Now it's something you do. It got verbed. Verbing weirds language.

H: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.

One of the most interesting consequences of computers, and later the internet, is the phenomenon of "verbing" (a term that I find specifically lovely because it is itself "verbed"). The most obvious incidence of this is the term "to Google," which is practically synonymous with performing an online search. Even now, I am blogging, a verbing of the word blog, which is a contraction of the words "web log." The Calvin and Hobbes comic featured above is taped to my dad's computer monitor (and has been for as long as I can remember) because he insists that when Bill Watterson drew the comic he was talking about computer language, and I think Pops is on to something. When used as a transitive verb, access seems to naturally precede either the words file or Internet. You can "access a room," but it just sounds odd, and even the "access" in "access road" is a noun.

As a trend in language, "verbing" seems pretty recent. But let us for a minute consider gerunds and past participles. Gerunds are present participles. In other words, they are a verb's action noun. When I say, "I am jogging," I am essentially nouning the verb of jogging and using it as the direct object of the sentence. When I say, "Jogging is the greatest thing ever," I am not only lying, I am using a gerund as an object of a sentence. Past participles get even more complicated because they can be passive or active and can also modify nouns, verbs, and entire sentences, so I'll spare you a full exegesis of their many powers here. However, just for the sake of example, in "the painted chair," painted is a passive modifier of a noun. It is an adjective made from the verb "to paint." So if verbs can become nouns, or even adjectives, I see no problem with nouns becoming verbs. 

What does bother me is L337, which, as far as the Internet is concerned, is the real impediment to understanding. For those fortunate enough not to know, L337 is a means of communicating online that takes its name from an abbreviation of the word elite to "leet," that is then rendered into a perplexing array of ASCII characters, the basic units of digital text communications. It is an intentionally difficult to read "language" used by savvy Internet users as a way of perplexing n0085 (aka "noobs," aka "newbies," aka novices to the scene). What makes L337 particularly difficult is its tendency to incorporate common keyboard misspellings. So "the," often mistyped as "teh," is incorporated into L337 as "t3h" or "73h." In online first-person shooters (FPS, or FP5), the term "owned," (which refers to someone who is defeated/killed, specifically in a really neat way) also appears as "pwned," reflecting to common typing error of accidentally striking the "P" key instead of the "O" key. The sum of L337 is a dense and often indecipherable string of characters, the appropriation of which often varies greatly from user to user, ie: the informal epithet "dawg" can be rendered "d@wg," "|)awg," daw9," or any number of other ways. For a medium intended to promote communication, collaboration, and democratic access to information, L337 is an ironic reactionary movement predicated on its exclusivity and opacity.

The L337 phenomenon seems to have already run its course. It enjoyed a brief vogue about five years ago and has since been largely relegated to the ash heap of history as another in a constant procession of discarded fads. However, one of it's spin-offs, the LOLcat, has proved to have exactly the opposite effect of L337. An LOLcat is a photo with humorous text which need not necessarily have anything to do with cats. The text often includes some of the more transparent L337 renderings, featuring abbreviations and awkward or incorrect grammar and spellings. However, to quote Anil Dash in a 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal, "This is a very large in-joke [that blurs the line] between Net geeks and normals." The LOLcat featured below applies the standard "IN UR" trope (IM IN UR FRIDGE...EATIN UR FOODZ or IM IN UR WIKIPEDIA...EDITING UR ARTICLES) to Schrödinger's proverbial cat. To me this seems to evidence the fundamentally inclusive aspect of the Internet. Janet Abbate's Inventing the Internet includes an analogous anecdote, noting that even at the birth of computer networking there was a sense of exclusion, elitism, and stubborn individualism. She quotes Lawrence Roberts, who wrote of pioneering Principal Investigators, "they knew in the back of their minds that it was a good idea and were supportive on a philosophical front, [but] from a practical point of view, they--Minsky, and McCarthy, and everybody with their own machine--wanted [to continue having] their own machine. It was only a couple years after they had gotten on [the ARPANET] that they started raving about how they could share research, and jointly publish papers, and do other things that they could never do before" (50). Perhaps there is something American about practicing a rugged individualism on the digital frontier, but it seems to be trumped by a sense of community and sharing (which made easy when what UR sharing is infinitely reproducible).

And one more just because.

Frame 1: "I Has a Buckit" Frame 2: "Noooo they be stealin' mah Buckit"