2001-07-08 - 11:58 p.m.

At Ince!

Lily is quite familiar with IRC, but I've only gotten into it since I've been playing Planetarion.

Oh relax, this isn't going to be about PA.

Anyway, like any form of human communication, IRC has developed its own private slang. The basis for most of this slang, not surprisingly, is typographical errors.

For example, IRC regulars often use "teh" for "the" on purpose. (How annoying, my word processing program keeps fixing my "teh"s)

Another example is "pron" for "porn," a subject frequently discussed on IRC. If you want to look super-cool, you'll spell it "pr0n."

Substituting numbers for letters is also good for that proto-cool look. In fact some IRC folks have scripts written that do it for them. The desire is to look "1337" (= leet = elete)

Another stylish thing to do is to festoon your speech with exclamation points and then let up on the shift key, to make it look like you are so excited you can't help yourself.

Put it all together and you get stuff like:

##Uberhamster## Whar is teh pr0n, fs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111112222

fs = fuck sake!

One of the cutest of the IRC is the word "ince," an obvious typo for "once." The I and the O keys are right next to each other. The general usage is "at ince!" as in "I need defense at ince!" Somehow they've managed to turn it into an adverb: "I will be there incely!"

The last few days Lily and I have been using the word constantly. It's "at ince!" this and "at ince!" that. Lily's so cute when she does stuff like that.

And speaking of cute, the solution to the problem I mentioned yesterday occurred to me. Linda's unnamed daughter is now named Ince most often referred to as "Little Ince." That's not a terribly feminine name, but hamsters aren't terribly girlish. A lot of times it's hard to tell what sex they are unless you are an expert.

So I hope now that little Ince has a name, this will encourage me to tame her.