Son of Apus (who coincidentally plies his trade at a computer adjacent to JD's Engine Room) recently celebrated his quarter century, so it must be some 15 years ago that I heard him using the word 'fasety' for 'aggressive in a non-violent way'. Friends and colleagues I tried it on had not heard of it and it might well have been no more than a short-lived expression used by schoolkids in our neighbourhood.
Now a pal down here at the seaside has come up with another neologism, courtesy of his 14-year-old son who, upon beating his dad at a computer game, gleefully exclaimed: 'I owned you!'. When questioned, the lad confirmed that 'own' means 'beat' and, just like my son all those years ago, was surprised his dad didn't know the word.
Just another local fashion, or has anyone out there encountered this usage?
10 comments:
I think the correct term is actually "pwn" -- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pwn
Both are common in online games. "Own" came first, and then "pwn" was born of a typo that people purposely perpetuated. "Owning"/"pwning" implies not merely winning, but humiliating your opponent.
There's lots of information on 'pwn' on the Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary.
As for 'fasety', could it stem from a mishearing of 'feisty'? Googling it threw up lots of misspellings of 'safety', some pages in Polish, and precisely one example of it meaning 'aggressive'.
So it looks like 'own' in this sense will survive much longer than 'fasety'... I assume than pwn is the Welsh version (and who but a Welshman could pronounce it?).
I did wonder if fasety could be a derivative of feisty, but feisty is hardly a word that South London schoolkids would have encountered. Maybe it has to do with getting into someone's face? I believe this is common parlance among our colonial cousins.
My son uses the word "own" on a regular basis and I have become quite used to it. A word he just recently started using that drives me up a wall is "meh" as in:
"How was the movie?"
"Meh."
"Own" is quite popular. It's here to stay (for a while, anyway...)
"Meh" is pretty wide-spread, too.
The blog Fritinancy had a good post about 'meh' a while back: http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2008/11/meh-you-could-look-it-up.html
Oh, and here's the one example of 'fasety' meaning aggressive I found via Google. The page was blocked at work (inappropriate rather than malicious): http://www.dontstayin.com/chat/k-2674101/c-7
Fasety lives on... that's unmeh. And don't tell me I shouldn't use unmeh; a recent TV doc on technology featured software that reveals hidden messages in electronic images. And the relevant software screen'button' wasn't labeled 'reveal', it was labeled 'unhide'.
Doubleplusungood if you ask me.
AHD has '[t]o have control over' as definition 1b in the verb usage.
Oops. That's own in my previous comment
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