On the Pronunciation of Internet Acronyms

The above YouTube video serves two purposes as the introduction to my post. Its first purpose is to help illustrate precisely what I mean when I talk about the pronunciation of Internet acronyms. The second is to inflict upon you a merciless earworm that will continue to torment you long after you depart my blog.

As I hail from a group of exceedingly nerdy friends, and tend to associate with websites and online communities were geekiness is reveled in (not against, as I hasten to note), I have come across real-life (or, in a tone befitting this post, IRL) pronunciations of acronyms coined mostly for ease of communication online. Among these: LOL (Laughing Out Loud), ROFL (Rolling On Floor Laughing), LMAO (Laughing My @$$ Off), and PWN (Not technically an acronym, but likely derived from a typographical error in the spelling of "owned." It has the same meaning). The Internet literati seem to be of two minds concerning such spoken cultural allusions. Some treat them as pure acronyms and speak each individual letter. LOL is Ell Oh Ell; ROFL is Are Oh Eff Ell. Others turn them into words, slurring their individual letter sounds together and creating neologisms. LOL is Lawl, ROFL is Rawful. The above video is an example of the latter, though it does take it to a slight extreme. It takes some terms and phrases generally only spoken in letter form (such as DM--Dee Em--and WTF--Doubleyou Tee Eff) and tries to sound them out phonetically, despite their derth of vowels.

I've noticed a few oddities and idosyncracies in these pronunciations, however. Certain acronym phrases, especially those consisting of three words or letters, tend to have spoken equivalents that are neither phonetic aproximations or letter-by-letter re-spellings. Instead, they're something... else.

Take the example video above. One of the terms it uses is OMG, short for Oh My (insert your favorite expression of shock that begins with a G here--Goodness, Gosh, God, Gadzooks, et cetra). Two common real-world pronunciations of OMG exist--Oh Em Gee, and "ohmig." In my experience, Oh Em Gee is the more common of the two. However, seemingly more prevalent than "ohmig" is the phrasing used in the video above: "Oh muh guh." This pronunciation actually appears to be a form of the full phrase (most likely "Oh My God" in this particular case) in which the syllables of the second two words have become slurred and assimilated with those of the first, resulting in a kind of "half-spoken" version of the full phrase.

Other phrases this tends to happen to (as demonstrated in the above) are FTW (For The Win) and WTF (What The... well, I'm sure you can guess). It is slightly more difficult to make the "assimilation" argument for FTW, as a true assimilative version of FTW would probaly sound more like "Fer Ter Wer" as opposed to "Fuh Tuh Wuh." Instead, the spoken form of FTW sounds more like a reversed version of WTF's: "Wuh Tuh Fuh." (For WTF, one could possibly make the case for abreviation as well).

I wonder what causes these pronunciations to come out like they do? I'm not sure--it's not like I've done research on this sort of thing--but I can say that it does seem to have some common mental genesis for all of the geeks who use Internet acronyms in their everyday speech. I know that I was mentally pronouncing "WTF" as "Wuh Tuh Fuh" long before I ever heard it out loud, and I wasn't the least bit shocked when I finally did that my suspicions were confirmed.

How very odd.

I was writing a homework assignment down in my planner today when I made a curious observation.

My planner, like so many others I've had in the past, has little quotes in the heading of each week. They're all very general, very standard "inspirational" fare, the sort of thing you'd find on those motivational posters with the black borders and nondescript pictures of people snowboarding and large, block serif letters. ("DETERMINATION - A goal is just a place to stop and catch your breath before you move forward." Mountain climber with a constipated expression.) I haven't paid much attention to them, in general, until I saw one today that I thought I could use as a chapter header in the Wordkeepers somewhere.

I thought, Hey. I need more chapter-heading quotes. Lemmie look through this thing and see what I can find.

"So?" you say. "Then what?"

Well, my eyebrows made a few interesting movements as I noted something peculiar about all the quotations.

Mainly, that they were all made by women.

Now, being in possession of a pair of X chromosones myself, I'm all for grrl power. But it struck me as a bit peculiar that every single quote in the notebook was of Strong Woman origin when this fact had never been advertised on the notebook itself. It wasn't specifically marked off as a Feminist Inspiration Planner or Planner For Awesome Chicks. I suppose the flower motif on the inside stationary is a bit girly, but there's no hint of that anywhere on the outside. Nor was there any when I bought it--the outside cover simply says "2008 Daily Planner," and the price sticker, when it was still stuck on, echoed the same sentiments.

Perhaps this was the maker's intention. Maybe the designer of the planner planned a quiet revolt, silently but subversively filling their attractive sea foam green notebook with nothing but heartfelt, inspirational quotes from only the toughest of girls--Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anne Frank--in the hopes that someone would see them. See them, and be inspired. They would kick back in their chair, grinning at each clever quip, newfound respect for the female species beaming across their face, never once expecting to find this source of ineffable inspiration in the pages of a 99-cent planner--

Wait, 99-cent planner? Who the devil am I kidding?

This can't end well.

I find it rather amusing, telling people what both my major and minor are. I don't suppose I need to tell you what I'm majoring in (but in case you're curious, read the title of the blog), but my minor is Astronomy. This surprises people, as there seems to be a general notion among physical science majors that we liberal arts folk are a lot of foppish dandies whose romantic, obfuscating worldview distances from the facts of hard science. But I have always been enamored of the stars, I will eagerly devour any books I come across about string theory or general quantum physics, and I am quite possibly the only person in my department who knows what a Schwartzchild radius is, let alone how to calculate one.

Unfortunately, as fascinating as I find most of the world's disciplines, I have never been very good at math. Certainly, I find several concepts within the realm of higher mathematics intriguing (Grahmn's number is always a favorite), most numbers go straight through my head with nary a care.

In order to fulfil my Astronomy minor, I need to take calculus.

The first math course I took upon entering this college was MAT 101X.

Clearly, I have my work cut out for me.

This semester, I am taking MAT 108, best described as "Pre-Pre-Calculus." So, yes, slowly but surely, I am getting there. However, I think I may have trouble concentrating in this class. You see, my professor--

No, this isn't going in the direction you probably think it's going.

My professor, although I do not know his exact genesis, is from somewhere in the general vincinity of India. Perhaps Pakistan, perhaps somewhere else in the Middle East or what the British call the Orient. (I have never been sure whether to classify India as Middle Eastern as Oriental.) His accent is extremely thick, and he occasionally uses grammatical constructs typically avoided in American English. He says things such as "the wedding ceremony of my sister" or "more easier." His speech is notably lacking in some fricative sounds--anthing with a "th" or "sh" in it gets reduced to a /t/, /d/ or /s/.

And rather than being fascinated by his talk on the topic of mathematics (and me realizing that I need to kick myself for forgetting the quadratic formula AGAIN, even though I've had it drilled into me repeatedly), I'm sitting there pondering the nature of the rules that govern his accent (/θ/ -> /d/) and the grammar of his useage of adjectives. As I mentally compile a list of rules for his phonetic pronunciations of words, my hand pantomimes writing them in the air, when I should be simplifying a pair of polynomial fractions.

This is going to be a long year.