Internet slang

This article discusses general features of Internet slang. For detailed usages, see List of Internet slang.

Internet slang is slang that Internet users have coined and promulgated. Such terms typically originated with the purpose of saving keystrokes, and many people use the same abbreviations in text messages. The terms often appear in lower case, with capitals reserved for emphasis: The pronoun 'I', for example, often appears simply as 'i'.

To clarify the author's intent or mood, netizens may use emoticons. Emoticons (or smilies) such as ":)" may be used both genuinely and sarcastically; for example the ":P" emoticon, can express either genuine amusement and a sense of fun, or a negative sarcastic comment. Deciphering and understanding what was written per se versus the author's intent is part of the Internet's attraction and enjoyment. Like most jargon, Internet slang aggrandizes author and reader, causing them to appear as having specialized knowledge of an already complex medium.

Origins

The vocabulary of Internet slang draws from many different sources — typically environments that placed value on brevity of communication. Some terms, such as FUBAR have roots as far back as World War II.[1] Other terms come from more recent forms of communication, such as TTY and IRC. There are several sources of slang terms:

• abbrevations, such as addy for address
• acronyms and initialisms, such as lol for laughing out loud
• common typing errors which are affected deliberately, such as teh for 'the'
• uncommon but humorous errors deliberately used as an in-joke, such as "I WOD LIK A SONIC 2 ROM PLZ" (sic)
• deliberate munging or obscuring, including 1337 speak and Rot13
• military and hacker canon, including SNAFU, cruft etc.
• attempts to convey facial expressions and emotion, including <g> for grin, <bg> for big grin etc..
• tags meant to resemble HTML code. For example, in HTML, when "<b>" and "</b>" are placed around text, a web browser will display it in boldface. Because emotions and inflection do not apply to text, Internet users will feign HTML tags for such emphasis, such as '<sarcasm></sarcasm>' '<rant></rant>' or '<white lie></white lie>'. These 'tags' are often meant to be generally humorous, and are ironically pragmatic.
• emoticons (also known as smileys)

In some cases the source may be obscure or there may be multiple sources. An email or usenet signature is usually referred to as a sig or .sig; this may be an abbreviation or it may refer to the common signature file extension in *nix operating systems.

Many of the terms originated to save keystrokes or bytes in the days of low bandwidth links, comparable to the abbreviations used in wireless telegraphy and telegrams, so can be seen from the earliest days of bulletin board systems. A handful (for example, ASAP, PO'ed) far pre-date computers. The three-letter acronym remains one of the most popular types of abbreviation in computing and telecom terminology and slang. Similar systems have since come into use with users of text-messaging wireless telephones.

With the rise of instant messaging services (ICQ, AOL, and MSN, among others) the vocabulary has expanded dramatically. The abbreviations used in this medium share much with SMS language.

Sometimes users make up abbreviations on the spot, therefore many of them can seem confusing, obscure, whimsical, or even nonsensical. Another feature common to Internet communication involves the truncation and morphing of words to forms that users can type more readily.

The form "teh" offers a special case of this transformation. This originated as a corruption of "the", and often pops up spontaneously when typing fast. So common has it become, in fact, that it has made the jump to deliberate usage particularly when satirising newbies; a common example is referring to the internet as "teh internet" or "teh internets".

Common examples

Main article: List of Internet slang phrases