In an article I read recently in the Wall Street Journal, I discovered a few great‚ ideas for keeping up with the ever changing online language, and in the process, enhanced my recruiting and sourcing‚ abilities. The article has specific tips when using chat rooms or online communities.‚ Click here for the full article.

Here are some excerpts:

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For years, heavy users of Internet games and chat groups have conversed in their own written language, often indecipherable to outsiders. Now, some of those online words are gaining currency in popular culture — even in spoken form.‚ Online gamers use “pwn” to describe annihilating an opponent, or owning them. The word came from misspelling “own” by gamers typing quickly and striking the letter P instead of the neighboring letter O. Other words substitute symbols or numbers for similar-looking letters, such as the number 3 for the letter E. The language is sometimes called elite speak, or leetspeak, written as l33t 5p34k. The letter A, for example, can have several replacements, including 4, /\, @ , /-\, ^, and aye. As the Internet becomes more prevalent, leetspeak, including acronyms that used to appear only in text messages like “LOL” for laughing out loud, is finding a voice.

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Some suggest such verbal creations are nothing new and are integral to how language evolves. Gail Kern Paster, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has reason to believe that a certain English poet and playwright would cheer the latest linguistic leap. Just as the rise of the printed word and the theater spurred many new expressions during Shakespeare’s time, the computer revolution, she notes, has necessitated its own vocabulary — like “logging in” and “Web site.”

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A couple of years ago, Katherine Blashki, a professor of new media studies, didn’t understand some of the words used by her students at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Her subsequent, semester-long research on the subject found their use of leetspeak stemmed partly from wanting to find faster ways to express themselves online. As with other forms of jargon, it also enhanced a sense of belonging to a community, she says.

Source: The Wall Street Journal Online‚