You know you’re getting old when you have to start looking up what all the cool kids are calling the not-so-cool kids in the playground on Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary. Internet memes move too damn fast these days. In my day, they’d just bellow ‘FAG!’ on the zonewide ooc chat and be done with it. Everyone knew where they stood, which more often than not was in a state of impotent disgust, and just reach for the Ignore List. Some of the more witty and debonair types would extemporise and mix it up with a ‘ghey’ here and there, (note the ‘h’ - damnit, I wish I’d thought of that first), but on the whole, you called a spade a spade. Or something.
Anyway, because I don’t learn and ought to know better by now, I turned Local Chat back on in GuildWars the other night. Call it a kind of probation if you will. I wanted to see if the population of ‘Pre-Searing Ascalon City – English 1’ (a sort of cross between an open prison for minor cultural offenders, and a secure unit for Tourette’s sufferers), were ready to be admitted back into society yet. Turns out that I am a naive optimist and that these kids are almost certainly now beyond rehabilitation. Throw away that Krytan Key for good, I say.
Still, I did learn a new word: ‘emo’, which judging by the way it was being flung about with reckless abandon and vehement force, is the new ‘ghey’. At first glance, I guessed it was short for ‘emotional’, and that sort of stunned me a bit. Having raked homosexuality over the coals, we, as an online culture, are now attempting to make any emotions at all taboo and undesirable? The mind boggles. While I’m all for visions of a better mankind, I’m fairly sure emotions probably ought to be left in – you never know when that kind of thing might come in handy. I for one welcome our new Borg Overlords!
But then it couldn’t possibly mean emotional, purely because of the sheer ferocity and malice being hefted behind these insults – very emotional, and that would just make the whole thing ironic self-parody, which is almost certainly beyond the grasp of the typical MMO sockpuppet. My head hurts!
Off to Urban Dictionary again:
Urban Dictionary: Emo
Possibly not as a reliable source as the Oxford English Dictionary, but you need a subscription for that, and it is, if anything, even slower than me to stay ‘hip with the kids’. Ohhhhhh…why didn’t you say ‘Generation X’ in the first place? From the look of it, an ‘Emo Kid’ is like a Goth, but without the conviction or interpersonal skills. Outstanding! Even the Goths kick downwards, which is nice. I think everybody should have somebody to victimise.
I guess the very act of maintaining a blog puts me firmly in ‘Emo Kid’ territory myself, and I do confess to enjoying ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division immensely, although I suspect to be a proper Emo Kid, I’d have to manage a listen-through without giggling uncontrollably the whole track long.
Still, to my mind, the real ‘Emo Kids’ of the piece are the ones that spend their whole time sitting in groups outside the bank, swearing at passers by because their raid isn’t ready, or their friends aren’t on. Yes yes, we’re all “emo”, right. And “ghey” too, probably. Less talk, more grind!
Dear Diary,
Mood: Peevish. Am ignoring ALL of GuildWars again…