I wIlL tELL yA 'bOut "What No One Else Bothered to
Tell You on IRC"
mAybE yA kNoW iRc aLrEaDy,
mAyBe yA dOn'T. To wHoM dUnNo,
U cAn 5eEk tO aNoTheR sOuRcE cOz' I cAn'T teLL
yA wHoLE oF tHat.
cLicK
hEre tO kNoW mOrE, & dUn fOr6eT to cOmE hErE a.S.a.P, oTaY ! 8)
Cyberculture
Once you get into IRC, you are bound to experience
a "cyber- culture shock." IRC is actually
a sort of virtual
community with a language all of its own. English is almost exclusively
spoken
in all countries,
but IRC has adapted a dialect that can be confusing at first.
In the IRC world,
spelling and punctuation have been for the most part abandoned. Because
no one wants to
bother typing everything out exactly right, wasting time in the process,
punctuation is
rarely used, and typographical errors are common. The IRC community
has adapted its
own set of punctuation, spelling rules, and acronyms for simplicity.
Spelling
Words are often spelled differently from the conventional
spelling, sometimes to save keystrokes,
and sometimes
just to be different. "cks"
is almost always replaced by a simple "x",
for example.
Another example
is "kewl" instead
of "cool".
Acronyms
The IRC community
has developed a number of acronyms and abbreviations for common phrases
which can
be very confusing to a new user. I have listed all the ones I have seen.
All of them
are used widely
and understood by most experienced users.
lol or LOL
=> "Laughing out loud"
or "Laughing on line"
(In other words,
the person who typed this is laughing)
rofl or
ROFL => "Rolling
on Floor Laughing"
lmao or LMAO
=> "Laughing my A** off"
brb or BRB
=> (I'll) be right back
bbl or BBL
=> (I'll) be back later
wb or WB
=> Welcome back!
re => short
for "re-hello" (hello again)
lo => hello
k => okay
oic => Oh,
I see!
ppl => people
irl => in
"real life"
btw => by the
way
ne1 => anyone
otoh => on
the other hand
Emoticons
Emoticons are facial expressions symbolized using
simple tricks with characters. For example,
tilt your head
ninety degrees to the left and look at the following line.
:-)
Do you see the person smiling? This is just one of the many variations
of faces found on IRC.
Here are a list
of examples i've found.
:-)
smile
:-(
frown
;-)
wink
;-(
angry
<8-)
smile with glasses and a hat
This is by no means a complete list of emoticons I've seen on IRC. Be creative!
Try inventing your
own emoticons and dazzle your IRC neighbors.
IRC Grammar
Because special typefaces (bold, italic, etc.)
aren't possible in IRC (at least not on older clients),
some new means
have developed to emphasize words.
The most common is the _underscore_. I don't recommend using them for a
number of reasons.
*This* is becoming
more popular these days and so is ^this.^ If you really want to emphasize
a word,
you may want to
CAPITALIZE it. Just be careful about capitalizing a whole phrase or sentence,
because IT IS CONSIDERED
YELLING!!
