Ever play Sim Copter? Lots of grunts and stuff. It eventually became known as Simlish as the Sims got popular. I don't know about the Sims, but in Sim Copter, you can swap out the audio files and change the grunts and stuff to whatever you want.
Also, it should be a local noise, not a private noise. Unless you're close and you do a *psst.
As for abusing, bah. I can walk around going "booga" to people in real life, and there isn't even a /report command. As long as I leave before they can attack me or summon a cop, I'm fine.
Ideally, we'd all have microphones and the game would run a voice changer. Then there would be background chatter, realistic grunts, intonation, and all kinds of great stuff. It would be a pain if you're trying to play in a noisy place, or where other people want quiet. But that's something that's still a long way off, if it ever happens at all for this game.
Maybe when the electrode-hat controller gets advanced enough, we'll be able to synthesize voices, accents and all, without moving our mouths. That would solve the "playing PlaneShift in a library" problem.
