pwnd

Gather around, children. I am going to tell you the story of how a little word came to be.

You see, back in the hay-day of online first person shooters, the days of Counter Strike, kids would play with one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse. This is, as we all know, the best configuration to use when playing a first person shooter. In the occurrence of a kill, a frag, of an opponent to whom a player had previously been talking trash, the player would sweep their mouse hand to the keyboard to type some form of insult. The word owned made its way to the foreground as a popular cornerstone for trash-talking, as it is a versatile word that can be mixed into virtually any flavor of insult. “I owned you”, “You just got owned, bitch”, or even “Oh snap, owned to the domed with my boned” are just a few variations one can come up with on the fly.

Eventually, players decided this was too time-consuming, and many shortened their post-frag trash talk to one or two words, often only typing in owned. Some argue this came to pass due to the laziness ingrained deep within each and every child of our society, an example of how everything can be shortened into one or two milliseconds of entertainment and then passed by like so much discarded refuse. Others subscribe to the belief that it is a simple matter of taking the least amount of time to effectively talk trash so as to quickly get that hand back on the mouse for further “ownage”. Regardless, the abbreviations continued and eventually owned was shortened to ownd, as the letter ‘e’ is the most expendable letter in terms of retaining maximum readability.

The next stage in the birth of this wondrous word was unintentional. If you look at your keyboard, you will notice that the ‘o’ key is dangerously close to the ‘p’ key. I’m sure you can imagine that in a flurry of emotional trash-typing, it can be very easy to hit the ‘p’ key instead of the intended ‘o’. The product of this mistake is pwnd. This rarely corrected typing accident occurred so often that certain players began using the term pwnd in jest of other players. This led to a more widespread use of the new word, which eventually went from flippant remark to standard slang. Thus, pwnd worked its way into the lexicon of online gaming we have today.

Now get off my lap before I pwn your face off.

above: pwn-age