Ptupid!

Not to long ago, I was looking at comments* for a particular video on YouTube, when a read one where the person asserted that he'd "pwned" someone. I made the mistake of correcting their spelling/typing gaff, only to be chastised. You see, this budding MENSA member meant to type it that way.

I realize that this is a sign of my distance from all things hip/cool/now. But the fact that I got tripped up by this "word" is also proof that those of us who attempt to apply logic to the world around us are the true idiots.

As the Wikipedia article points out, the best guess scenario is that this came about as a result of people commonly mistyping "owned" because of the fact that "P" and "O" are next to each other on the qwerty keyboard. I'm sure that the every growing band of morons that have made "texting" such a popular pass-time also had a hand in it*. (The term "texting", by the way, doesn't pass the spell checker anywhere. What can we expect. When we arbitrarily decide to turn a noun into a verb things don't always go smoothly.)

People these days have done a full 360 from where I remember things being when I was younger. The big issue back then always seemed that kids tried to be like everyone else. I can remember my parents saying, "Be yourself!" when I would do something to emulate my contemporaries. Today the motive seems to be the opposite. People wast to prove that they are different at all costs. Think about it for a moment and I'm betting you can think of at least one person whose every move if motivated by a need to stand out and seem anti-ordinary. I know a bunch of them.

The concept that a type-o would be embraced by people as a cool thing to do make me want to weep for us as a species. Go ahead. Disgust yourself. Search "pwned", or "pwnd" on Google and see just what you find.

*Unless I miss my guess, both "comments on YouTube" and "texting" will be topics found on this blog in the future.