For better or worse, TAZ is what jumps out at me, the Looney Toons character.
I got a new travel trailer and am contemplating a vanity plate for it. So far the leading contender is TTITD, That Thing In The Desert, a visual shorthand for Burning Man – it doesn’t roll off of the tongue easily.
Wish me luck.
I don’t get the “P”, or was that to kind of disguise it?
I have no idea why, but “pwn” is a common variant spelling.
TBH, I see “pwn” way more often than “own” in gamer and internet chat (actually, most often as “pwned” as in “you got pwned!”) It goes back to at least the 90s. I remember it from BBS leetspeak. There’s controversy as to how it’s pronounced. Some say it’s just “own.” I and my friends say it as “pone.” I think some even say it as “pawn.”
ETA: Actually, scratch the 90s and BBS leetspeak bit. Apparently, according to reputable sources, it’s the early 2000s where it rose to prominence and Google ngrams supports that when I graph for “pwned.” I coulda sworn it was 90s and BBSes, but apparently it’s a little bit after that during the early wave of mass Internet.
Etymonline cites it to “by 2001”:
“dominated, humiliatingly defeated, taken over,” by 2001, “leetspeak” slang, probably from the common typographical mistake for owned (the -p- and -o- keys being adjacent on standard English keyboards) in the gamer slang sense “completely dominated by another” (in a contest).
Merriam-Webster gives 1999 as first known usage.
Hilarious, given how in the other thread I observed that they have okayed LSD for their regular plates for decades now (I worked for the Florida tag agency in the late 80’s and definitely recall seeing them then).
Exactly…driving that sports car was pure ecstasy…I didn’t even know that it was a drug too.
“P” is next to “O” on a keyboard.
Back in my online NASCAR race days, I was competing at an online race at Talladega. While cruising along during a caution flag, car #69 was in front of me. I pulled along side to check out his paint job (we designed our own cars) when I noticed he had tongues sticking out of the round part of each number licking the other number. I left a comment all the other drivers could see saying “IC tongues!!”. During the rest of the race if someone else saw the tongues, a comment would pop up saying “IC tongues 2”. I’m sure some of the other competitors wondered what was going on. I later entered a vehicle in a truck race, the #77 Get Atemore Bar Chevy. A couple other competitors got the joke.
‘You’re about to get pwned’ were the final words heard by the villain before getting killed in South Park’s 2006 Emmy winning episode, Make Love, Not Warcraft, arguably their most influential. It would have been in wide use at the time.
It occurs to me that, if there are African Americans in the conversation, “I owned you!” could be problematic.
I think “pwn” is less likely to provoke an emotional reaction.
It’s certainly an interesting linguistic case. Usually, with new coinages, it’s clear how it’s pronounced, but there’s some debate about the spelling at first. With “pwn”, though, the origin was in a textual format, and so the spelling is completely definite, but the pronunciation is ambiguous.
Though “pone” does seem to have emerged as the standard.
pwnt also shows up occasionally as a shortening of pwned.
The Welsh sometimes use W for the “oo” sound, so it could be pronounced “poon” and “pooned”.
So PWNTANG would be right out.