Out of touch

Each morning this week, I have had to start the day with a search for the meaning of a word. This morning, it was an acronym in an email message proposing a small group meeting at a conference. "Typical BOF format," the message said. Wikipedia to the rescue:

A BoF session, an informal meet-up at conferences, where the attendees group together based on a shared interest and carry out discussions without any pre-planned agenda.

OK, that makes sense, and I sort of picked up on that meaning from the context. But there were no contextual clues for yesterday's vocabulary word.

This is the central panel from Sunday's Unshelved comic. I had to keep staring at it. What is the verb in that sentence? "It's not a word," an IM buddy said. "It's 'pwns.'" So I googled. OK, a gamer thing, so no wonder I didn't recognize it. It seems unlikely to me that a cataloger (a knitting cataloger) would know and use this word casually, but I suppose that's the joke. Still, I found it disconcerting how far I had to go to get a joke written by and largely for members of my profession.

I'm glad I did, though. The Wikipedia entry on pwn is extremely interesting, especially (for me) the bit about pronunciation. It dredged up old graduate school interests* about how Internet communication is in this weird space between the spoken and written word.

* It floors me that crap I wrote on Usenet 14 years ago is out there to be found so easily.