Computer-Mediated Communication Slang

Still another category of slang that catches on in the in-game conversations among LoL players is the vocabulary words specific to CMC, especially Internet language and Netspeak.

They are the linguistic constructs that arise out of the electronic character of different

50 “Elo” refers to a rating system designed for calculating how skillful a player is relative to other competitors.

computer-mediated formats such as instant messaging, email, and social network services and

are therefore associated with digital product users or modern or city people in general. Based on my informers’ use of language, there are mainly two categories of lexemes particular to

CMC: quasi-nonverbal cues and specialized abbreviations.

Quasi-nonverbal cues refer to any stream of representations of non-verbal expressions or behaviors that are transmitted through the typewriter keyboard. They could be further subcategorized into emoticons and onomatopoeic words that carry meanings particular to the communication platforms created by electronic devices.⁵¹ Let’s look at the respective details of the two. Emoticons, or smileys, are the combinations of keyboard characters, especially punctuation marks and letters that resemble facial expressions. The most frequently appearing emoticons in my conversational data include = =, @@, 0.0, and XD. There are overall 102 of

the 400 players (25.5%) who resort to these innovations in order to express certain attitudes toward others’ speech or something happening around them. The following excerpts

demonstrate how emoticons are relevant to the interactions among LoL players:

(16) Game No. 22 (recorded on August 23, 2015) 1 飛斯 (Mid)： 你在幹嘛

ni zai ganma

‘What are you doing?’

2 李星 (Jungle)： 當機 dangji

51

‘My computer just crashed.’

 3 飛斯 (Mid)： = =

(17) Game No. 8 (recorded on August 15, 2015) 1 飛斯（敵人）正在大殺特殺！

feisi zhengzai dashatesha

‘Enemy Fizz is on a killing spree!’

 2 飛斯 (Mid)： @@

‘The enemies are totally directed against me.’

 3 索娜 (Support)： 0.0

4 薩科 (Jungle)： 兩個同時開我大

liang ge tongshi kai wo da

‘The two enemy champions used their ultimate abilities on me at the same time.’

(19) Game No. 22 (recorded on August 23, 2015)

 1 布朗姆 (Support)： 我說過 雷文打不贏我 XD wo shuo guo leiwen da bu ying wo

‘As I mentioned earlier, Riven can never take me down.’

We have seen in these excerpts that, even though there are a variety of emoticons used among

LoL players, they serve completely different communication purposes. For example, = = is a

display of the speaker’s speechlessness; as Excerpt 16 shows, 飛斯 uses the emoticon to

express that he is both surprised and upset at the situation in which 李星’s computer is crashing down but cannot do anything about it. The emoticons @@ and 0.0 can accept more flexible interpretation, but mostly seen as looks of astonishment. That is, two @ or 0 in a sequence depict a facial expression with two eyes wide open. In Excerpt 17, 飛斯 and 葛雷 夫 say nothing but to show their surprise @@ at a lost team fight, where an enemy champion is killing spree (dashatesha); in Excerpt 18, 索娜 uses 0.0 to convey that she is a bit shocked at 薩科’s strong reaction about being targeted by the enemy team. Note that @@

and 0.0 in most cases have an effect of easing the tense atmosphere of talks. Still another emoticon XD is a pictographic way to show the expression of laughter; when the reader tilt his/her head sideways, X shapes like squeezed eyes and D a wide opened mouth. As shown in Excerpt 19, 布朗姆 is smug about his ability to take down 雷玟; with the use of XD, he makes his words more like a joke rather than a display of arrogance. Let’s now turn to onomatopoeic words found in the LoL game world. Onomatopoeic words are language that phonetically imitates the sound that it describes; in the current context, they only refer to those written particles resembling exclamations. Sigh, laughter, and a grunt of acknowledgement are the three most expressed human reactions through such written onomatopoeia, recorded respectively by Chinese characters ai (唉), ha (哈), and en (嗯). In my data, there are totally 33 of the 400 players (8.25%) who engage in the practice of these exclamative words. The following excerpts demonstrate their use during LoL gaming.

(20) Game No. 32 (recorded on September 4, 2015) 1 路西恩 (AD Carry)： 中上崩盤

zhong shang bongpan

‘We are losing the mid and top lanes.’

 2 卡特蓮娜 (Mid)： 差距唉

‘I thought the champion’s W ability has not been changed. I picked it up when I played her for the first time.’

 2 菲歐拉 (Top)： 我平常都點 W 現在換 Q 哈哈

wo pingchang dou dian W xianzai huan Q haha

‘Ordinarily I pick up the W ability first, but recently I pick Q up instead. (Laughing).’

(22) Game No. 58 (recorded on September 25, 2015) 1 飛斯 (Top)： 達瑞斯

daruisi

‘Darius,’

2 好像跳了

hoaxiang tiao le

‘He seems to have logged out the game.’

3 阿姆姆 (Jungle)： 恩 en

‘(Grunting).’

Excerpts 20-22 show how the three onomatopoeic words function to present the speakers’

different emotions or reactions at the moments of talk. In Excerpt 20, 卡特蓮娜 uses ai to stress her helplessness toward her team’s falling behind (chaju) after their top and mid laners

lost to the opposing champions. In Excerpt 21, 菲歐拉 adds haha to what she says in order to bring out a casual vibe to the conversation. In Excerpt 22, 阿姆姆 agrees with 飛斯’s words by using the particle en (嗯). What is worthy of mention here is that the suggested emotional noises are not necessarily “genuine” (Crystal, 2006), which means that the senders may not actually make the noises in reaction; instead, these words seem to behave like slang, part of which meaning is only available to the community. In line with this, the exclamative particles here mean something more than those used in formal written documents. Take ai for example. While ai is the most used onomatopoeic word in LoL game chat, it is not a popular choice of word to express helplessness in everyday speech. Actually, online gamers have given ai pejorative overtones. That is, ai suggests not only that the speaker is disappointed at the current situation but also that the speaker belittles a target participant or bystander. Refer back to Excerpt 13. It is clear that 希維爾’s use of ai is an aggressive one; instead of saying that 希維爾 has no choice but to accept the team’s failure, it is more true that she chooses to blame her teammates for the downfall. This peculiar nature of slang – that its meaning is exclusive to a speech community – can also be seen in two more quasi-nonverbal cues that are found from my data: … and zz. These two are neither emoticons nor onomatopoeic words;

they depict physical conditions of someone, the states of speechlessness (…) and sleeping (zz) respectively. See the excerpts below for their use in the actual conversations:

(23) Game No. 52 (recorded on September 20, 2015) 1 達瑞斯 (Top)： JG

‘Jungler,’

2 出個泰坦呀

chu ge taitan ya

‘You may want to build Titanic Hydra.’

3 雷柯煞 (Jungle)： 但是

(24) Game No. 41 (recorded on September 6, 2015) 1 雷柯煞 (Jungle)： 李星都來了

lixing dou lai le

‘The enemy Lee Sin had come.’

2 我過去也是死

wo guoqu ye shi si

‘I would have been killed if I had gone to assist you.’

3 雷玟 (Top)： 李星來了

‘Our deaths exchanged for only one kill?’

6 雷玟 (Top)： 你開的?

 8 雷玟 (Top)： 白癡 zZ baichi

‘Idiot.’

9 雷柯煞 (Top)： 你在那 G 點他 ni zai na G dian ta

‘You were pinging him.’

10 雷玟 (Top)： 笑了 xiao le

‘That is funny.’

Compared to most onomatopoeic words discussed above, … and zz as slang terms are more conventionalized in a way that they cannot be easily made sense of by laymen who do not engage in Internet-based communication. A line of text appearing with only dots, or ellipsis, is a way of telling others that the speaker is startled by something happening and becomes speechless afterwards. In Excerpt 23, after being informed that the jungler does not have enough money to purchase Titanic, a powerful item for short-range damage dealers, 達瑞斯 sends out the text of mere dots to show that he does not know what to say. As for the string of letters zz, it means that the speaker falls unconscious or asleep because he/she cannot deal with the current situation or is overwhelmed by helplessness. In this case, it is obvious that the bodily reaction described is not at all genuine; the speaker does not really become unconscious or asleep, or he/she would not have sent the message in question. In Excerpt 24, 雷柯煞 and 雷玟 have an argument about who should be blamed for starting a fight (kai);

in Line 8, 雷玟 is so mad that she calls 雷柯煞 by an insulting name, baichi, and uses zz to

the mistake he made. In fact, using ellipsis to express speechlessness and zz to express helplessness is not limited to CMC but very common in comics where dialogues are in the forms of written texts. Because of this, the slang usage of the combinations of characters should also be well recognized by the community of comic readers.

In addition to quasi-nonverbal slang words, the environment of CMC also gives rise to abbreviations that symbolize intended messages. The purpose behind such innovative language is simple: for the convenience of transferring the existing correspondences between form and meaning into a realm of interaction. Among the 400 players I interacted with, there are 42 in total (10.5%) who take advantage of this type of CMC slang. The abbreviations most frequently used in the LoL player conversations are sor, 3Q, thx, and fk, which are the products of different morphological processes. Sor is short for “sorry,” an instance of back-clipping; 3Q, meaning “thank you,” in Crystal’s (2006) term, is like combinations of rebus in which the sound values of the numeral 3 in Chinese and letter Q act as the two English words; thx and fk are reduced forms for “thanks” and “fuck” after they are medial-clipped and the sound values of their codas are replaced by the homophones x and k respectively.