Neologism - Arts student speaks.
i think the most fascinating thing about technology is how in the process of inventing all its inventions, and through the innovation of new innovations and the creation of new knowledge, it has similarly invented, innovated, created a whole new language on its own.
Take for example the word 'blog' which in English terms would be the equivalent to a 'swamp' or a 'mud pool' of some sort. what first began as 'web log' has neatly over time evolved into the term all of us who read this know of - 'blog'
the word 'spam' was actually the conflation of spiced ham and other forms of canned meat (now officially known as SPAM luncheon meat) and the terminology was made famous by the comedy routine in British TV show "Monty Python's Flying Circus" where a restaurant's menu items all devolved into spam.
Words such as 'drive' or 'inter-net' are all derivations from one word or another. and this is true even outside the technological world. the word 'toilet', a word we commonly use and its origin we often forget, was first used combining the words 'toil' and 'outlet', thus the washroom we refer to actually has implications of the kind of pain we're supposed to go through.
The nature of the English language (more than other languages) is that it has been allowed to evolve to suit the generation in question. More so with the inclusion of the technological factor. as long as there are new entities, be it in the from of something physical like computers, or knowledge-based like hypothesis, there will be a demand for new labels and new words to refer to them.
Before we had the 'qwerty keyboard' (named after the first six letters), we had the 'azerty keyboard'. We have seen the music playing devices evolve from the LDs to cassettes to CD-ROMs to include moving pictures in first VCRs to VCDs and now DVDs. and to find out all these progressions, we no longer 'research' on it, we 'Google' it. The World Wide Web - the computer network consisting of a collection of internet sites that offer text and graphics and sound and animation resources through the hypertext transfer protocol - is now known as such with the alliteration of 'W' words for easy usage and easy remembrance.
interestingly enough, this can all be reflected in a subset of a subset of technology - one of the more popular games - Defense of the Ancients, or as it is more commonly referred to, DotA.
I am pretty sure that we all in one way or another, either as victim or as culprit, have heard the bursts of randomly combined words - freezing field, techies, cast doom, stun stun stun OWNAGE!!! or something of that sort. It is a language that if one has no previous background or fore-knowledge of, than he/she is going to get completely lost. and yet for the compulsive gamers, these terms are absolutely necessary for proper game play.
similar to this, we have also witnessed a new language mostly used amongst teens through word communicative devices namely the Short-Messaging services and MSN messenger) where letters have been conveniently taken out (like 'abt' instead of 'about') letters being substituted as long as they sound alike ('z' or 'x' replacing 's' such as 'computer gamez') spelling mistakes (typos) going uncorrected ('teh' instead of 'the') alternating caps (LiKe THiS) and the many many acronyms (lol- laughing out loud, fyi - for your information, btw - by the way, dc – disconnected) the list goes on.
simple rules, but when put together may come out something like this :
BtW, YeST i WaNTeD 2 gO OfF @ aBt 9, bUt i DC-ed b4 ThaN. lolx. So DiSsaPoiNTinG oNez.
Perhaps I’m not very fluent in this, but you get the idea.
And while the government might be worried about the emergence of such language, some of it might arguably be justified. in short messages and even in DotA, short form and techinical terms in no doubt speeds up the process of communication, which is one of the purposes of technology. In fact, the concept of having shorthand is not a new feature exclusive to technology. As long as there has been writing, there has always existed shortcuts, and shorthand, only that technology has developed one of its own and has abundantly proliferated it world wide.
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidtalk.mspx
http://www.etymonline.com/