I was told a year or two about that it’s pronounced “pone,” like the Southern butter-fried corn dish. The things you learn from rooming with a computer geek.
“Pwned” has got to predate WoW by several years. If I had to guess, I’d say it came from Counterstrike, if not earlier hacker culture.
Ah. I see the confusion. You’re thinking of a dancing monkey. If they had wanted a monkey to dance for them and not a political satirist, their first step in that direction would have been to hire a dancing monkey and not a political satirist.
If you read the ‘w’ in “pwned” as a Greek omega, you can pronounce it as a long ‘o,’ and thus pronounce “pwned” as “poned” (rhymes with “boned.”)
Or you could realize that the O and P keys are together, and ‘pwned’ goes all the way back to Doom, if not before. “Dude, I owned you.” Wikipedia cites it as 1994, but I think I may recall a previous usage.
The southern fried corn dish is just called “fritters”- “pone” refers to watching “nekkid people do the doo-dah on a tee-vee or computah”.
I thought that was “pawn.”
My experience with Southern food is limited to grits and the helpings at the Waffle House, so pardon me if my terms are outdated.
In my head, I always read it as “pooned”. cf, the Welsh word cwm, pronounced “coom.”
And my 1989 purchase of More of the Straight Dope is justified yet again. 
“cornpone” = “cornbread” – baked, not fried.
That’s how I pronounce “pwn”.
Ha! Me too.
And here all this time, I’ve been pronouncing it “pwunned”, with the u almost silent, like it was only a semivowel.
I’m surprised to hear it was in use going all the way back to the first Doom, especially since the early Doom could only be played multi-player within a LAN.
The video has beel pulled from YouTube, stating:
“This video has been removed due to copyright infringement.”
This article attributes it to Fargo of Gamespy, author of The Daily Victim, whose untimely demise precipitated a dramatic drop in my interest in GameSpy.com.
Try:
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/politics/2006/04/30/colbert_press/index.html
There’s an ad you have to watch or click-through or something.
Translation: “Some unfunny conservative complained about it making the Prezident look bad.”
Holy crap. The thing that occurs me is that he’s not trying to be funny, and he’s just seething with anger. He’s just running with the golden opportunity of a lifetime.
Absolutely fearless. I love it.
By far the best part was the press secretary audition tape. My God, that was the most brutal, skewering satire I think I’ve ever seen…and he showed it TO THE PRESIDENT, who was a captive audience. Beautiful.
One more post. He stood there and forced the President to watch a film which literally said, “No matter what you do, we will dog your steps forever until you answer the hard questions.”
That’s almost frighteningly ballsy.
For those who want to see this here is a link that will take you to most of his speech. I have spent a good part of the last few hours trying to find it online and it seems to be vanishing from most websites that are putting it up within a few hours. Funny, that.
The lack of laughter at certain points seems to me related to the fact the Prez is in the room, a few seats away, while he is getting dumped on. I say this because Colbert is funny as hell and right on target.