: Is "mb" really a "lamerish staple"?
: I've used it in non-Myth contexts a few times and
: often been met with incomprehension.
Well, these days it'd be considered a staple of "txt", the language of nonverbal cellphone communications, along with "ppl" and other similar abbreviations.
Reading over my ancient post you just resurrected, today I would categorize netspeak variants according to two, maybe three variables: laziness, leetness, and (maybe) humor.
Classic internet acronyms such as AFK, BRB, AFAIK, RTFM, STFU, and so on, are low on the laziness scale. Typing in all caps or no caps is somewhat higher. "mb" and "ppl" and "gr8" and "2" and "u", etc, are high on the laziness scale.
Classic hacker jargon used in place of regular English (but made of repurposed real words or clever neologisms) are low on the leetness scale. Words like "leet" and "warez" are somewhat higher. "l33t" a"w4r3z" are higher still. "1337" is higher still, and "\/\/4®3Z" even more so.
Though now that I think about it, leetness and laziness are ultimately incompatible with each other, so really you get a spectrum: on the one end, people whose speech differs from proper English because it takes too much effort to be proper, and on the other hand people who put in extra effort to write in a nonstandard way in order to appear "in". Of course, I suppose one person can run the gamut, and say things like "l8r ur 1337ness, goin afk a sec".
The "humor" axis, if included at all, would be how tongue-in-cheek your use of such nonstandard language is.
So, txtspk is just very lazy. "Lamerish minor" (including TRO) is somewhat lazy and somewhat leet. "Lamerish major" is pure leet. Lemish is a humorous variant of TRO (and thus lamerish minor), being thus somewhat lazy, somewhat leet, and somewhat funny.