I Looked For A Sign.
A friend of mine expressed confusion over the acronym TFW today, which got me thinking about Internet acronyms and how intuitive they are. This is something that really interests me. TBH ('to be honest') is easy; I suspect that most people manage to work that out from seeing it a couple of times in context. TFW is impossible unless you've already seen the phrase 'that feel when' in the wild. I'm still not sure whether SMH is supposed to be 'shaking my head' or 'so much hate'; either works in the contexts in which it's used. In the case of GPOY, you can't really intuit either what it stands for ('gratuitous picture of yourself') or what the phrase it stands for actually means (usually 'this isn't actually a picture of me and may not even be a picture, but in some way it reminds me of myself (not of you, despite the "yourself" in the acronym)').
When I first started using the Internet, around the turn of the millennium, the only mysterious acronyms I remember encountering are LOL (and its variants), WTF and, unfortunately, A/S/L (not to be confused with American Sign Language). I'm pretty sure I had to look up or be told what LOL meant; I wonder whether I'd have been able to intuit it if I'd been older. Might have been tough, because it's often used on its own, whereas things like TBH get more context from the sentences they're in.
I didn't even realise WTF was an acronym. I thought it was just a confused noise. I pronounced it 'wuhtuf'.
Anyway, doing a bit of investigation into the history of online acronyms, I came across this online newsletter from 1989, which includes (on page 11) a list of emoticons and acronyms apparently in use at the time. Some of these acronyms, like BTW and LOL, are very familiar! Some, like OLM ('On Line Message') and H ('Huh?'), are less so.
It particularly strikes me that :O apparently means 'shout/yawn' and they've gone with the extremely ineffective 8) to represent surprise. For some reason there are also a lot of cup/mug/glass representations I've never seen in use; had they died out by the time I started using the Internet, or were they just not used in the largely Pokémon-related circles I moved in?
Come to think of it, I can't actually remember when I started seeing smilies on the Internet. Were they widespread when I first got online, or were they confined to certain communities? Oh, wait, people were using ^_^! That's right: I saw ^_^ a lot in my early days on the Internet, and :) only came along later. Or at least it did from my perspective, because apparently it was being used in 1989.
^_^ is from Japan, to my knowledge (it might just be Japanese-influenced), so it makes sense that I saw it a lot in my early fandoms (Pokémon and Final Fantasy). But I seem to recall seeing it in Lord of the Rings fandom as well. Was it big in fandom in general, and only later displaced by sideways smilies? I feel I saw a similar move away from Japanese influences in the terminology shift from 'shounen-ai'/'yaoi' to 'slash', but it's entirely possible that shift never happened; maybe it's an illusion that I only saw because I started getting into more UK/US fandoms.
Going back to the 1989 newsletter, I enjoyed 'For some reason, the ICONS in a past Fido Newsletter, were not the icons I have seen in use the past several years!!! Where did the nose come from?' Apparently the noseless/nosed smiley debate is almost as old as I am!
Entirely unrelatedly, I recently saw a dreamcatcher and had a sudden flashback to my childhood. I had a dreamcatcher in my room, and people who slept in there complained of bad dreams, so my mum concluded the dreamcatcher was evil and she set fire to it, stamped on it and threw it in the Thames.
When I first started using the Internet, around the turn of the millennium, the only mysterious acronyms I remember encountering are LOL (and its variants), WTF and, unfortunately, A/S/L (not to be confused with American Sign Language). I'm pretty sure I had to look up or be told what LOL meant; I wonder whether I'd have been able to intuit it if I'd been older. Might have been tough, because it's often used on its own, whereas things like TBH get more context from the sentences they're in.
I didn't even realise WTF was an acronym. I thought it was just a confused noise. I pronounced it 'wuhtuf'.
Anyway, doing a bit of investigation into the history of online acronyms, I came across this online newsletter from 1989, which includes (on page 11) a list of emoticons and acronyms apparently in use at the time. Some of these acronyms, like BTW and LOL, are very familiar! Some, like OLM ('On Line Message') and H ('Huh?'), are less so.
It particularly strikes me that :O apparently means 'shout/yawn' and they've gone with the extremely ineffective 8) to represent surprise. For some reason there are also a lot of cup/mug/glass representations I've never seen in use; had they died out by the time I started using the Internet, or were they just not used in the largely Pokémon-related circles I moved in?
Come to think of it, I can't actually remember when I started seeing smilies on the Internet. Were they widespread when I first got online, or were they confined to certain communities? Oh, wait, people were using ^_^! That's right: I saw ^_^ a lot in my early days on the Internet, and :) only came along later. Or at least it did from my perspective, because apparently it was being used in 1989.
^_^ is from Japan, to my knowledge (it might just be Japanese-influenced), so it makes sense that I saw it a lot in my early fandoms (Pokémon and Final Fantasy). But I seem to recall seeing it in Lord of the Rings fandom as well. Was it big in fandom in general, and only later displaced by sideways smilies? I feel I saw a similar move away from Japanese influences in the terminology shift from 'shounen-ai'/'yaoi' to 'slash', but it's entirely possible that shift never happened; maybe it's an illusion that I only saw because I started getting into more UK/US fandoms.
Going back to the 1989 newsletter, I enjoyed 'For some reason, the ICONS in a past Fido Newsletter, were not the icons I have seen in use the past several years!!! Where did the nose come from?' Apparently the noseless/nosed smiley debate is almost as old as I am!
Entirely unrelatedly, I recently saw a dreamcatcher and had a sudden flashback to my childhood. I had a dreamcatcher in my room, and people who slept in there complained of bad dreams, so my mum concluded the dreamcatcher was evil and she set fire to it, stamped on it and threw it in the Thames.