Most desired Sci-Fi Invention

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by Chancellor Valium

@mudshark: b-whu? It's the same length!

It is? No, no, no -- "contraction" is one letter longer than "corruption", heh heh heh.

(Actually, I see what you mean... I think.

"Ain't" is a contraction, but it's also an altered form of more than one earlier contraction (some of which are longer and some of which aren't, and most of which were even more awkward to begin with than "ain't" is) which, depending upon who's doing the defining, may also make it a corruption -- it's hard to tell, sometimes. The English language was a lot more fluid around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than it is now, and I think that, more than anything else, when the lists of What Would Be Standard English and What Wouldn't were being drawn up by the people who do that sort of thing, "ain't" was simply standing in the wrong queue, and it has never managed to recover from the gaffe. The Usage Notes in two entries on the page to which I linked above go into more detail on this, if you're interested, but, in my opinion, far more time has been spent in human history arguing about the validity (or lack, thereof) of the word "ain't" and how to correctly classify it than the subject is properly worth.

(Oh, and aren't parentheses fun? ))

@II: I have no idea what the 'z0r' is for, but it seems to be randomly added to words in 1337...

That's about it, really -- noise. h4XX0r, r0xx0rz, 5uXX0rz, LOLz0rz: it's all a hangover from the time when preadolescents used to send each other messages on their telephone pagers, and thought it was pretty clever to bamboozle their parents and teachers with odd spellings and character substitutions. It's funny and not a little pathetic when you see a forty-something, otherwise "respectable" citizen using words like "pr0n" without thinking, but there you go...