Language Investigation #2

There are a number of communities that I would say that I belong to and that have a specific type of language, sports, my friends, and even more specific still my roommates. The community that I feel has the most specialized language however, is a community of my friends, but it is the setting that makes it interesting. The world of online gaming, which for me is limited to my Xbox 360, has a language all its own. For starters, me and my friends have formed a clan online, meaning that we all chose gamertags, which is sort of like your screen name, that are similar. For example, my gamertag is wholegrainwhite, my friend Mike is wholegrainwheat, and my friend Nick is wholegraindough. While the choice of names may seem odd, we chose them because we thought they were funny and we call ourselves wholegrains online. Other people form their own clans, which means they have similar names as well and they play together online as a team which gives you an advantage.

Aside from clans and gamertags, there are many other words that are used in the online gaming community. When you are playing a game such as Gears of War, Halo, or Call of Duty 4, there is usually someone that ends up on your team or the other team that just isn't very good. Seeing as part of the game is trash talking, at least for my friends and I, you have to let these people know that they aren't all that great. So the word we use to refer to those people is newbs. This is supposed to be like newbies, or players that are new to the game, but it has come to describe people that are not only new to the game, but that have played for a long time and still aren't any good. This may seem a little mean, but that's just the way of the game. For the longest time everyone that I played against called me a newb until I got better with practice and now I get the chance to say it to other people.

Another part of the language that stems from this community comes from glitching. This is a favorite of my friend Mike's. He loves to find glitches in all of the games we play and use them against people. Glitches are errors in the game that you can find to give you an advantage and they are rather controversial because some say that they are a way of cheating, which they kind of are because not everyone can do them. One such glitch is called crabwalking. This is done by pushing the right buttons with the right timing at certain spots in the game and it makes your character move faster and slide around the screen instead of running like everyone else. There is also a glitch called kung fu flipping which is when you make your guy jump outside of the map you are playing on. The advantage to this is that nobody on the other team can find you to kill you because you are outside of the map, but you can still see and shoot at them.