Friday, October 10, 2008

Definitions for the terminally unhip:

Let me field a couple of questions recently asked by those of you who are not total online nerds and actually have things to do in real life:

  1. "What does 'zomg' mean?" Well, when you see "OMG!" on teh intarw3bz, it means "Oh My God!" Internet lore says that "zomg" comes from someone trying to type "OMG", but missing the Shift key with their left pinky and hitting "z" instead. Hence, "zomg". If you are nerdy enough for netspeak to creep into your spoken vocabulary, it is pronounced "zōmĭgŏd".
  2. "What's with the '!!!!1!!!1!one!!!'?" Another net joke stemming from a missed shift key. If someone was really carried away when trying to put a string of exclamation points after something, say in an internet argument, their finger might bounce off of the shift key for a keystroke or two, causing a numeral "1" to be inserted in the string of punctuation. The spelling out of "one" in the middle of the string is intended to indicate extreme hyperbole.

16 comments:

  1. Dunno about the first, but the 2nd IS a missed shift-key joke. Lots of missed key ones out there like "pwnd"

    TTYL!

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  2. so zomg is a quiet exclaim, as there could be no ZOMG!?

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  3. Of course, this now means you have to 'splain "teh intarw3bz". I would do it for you but I'm confused about how the tubes work.

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  4. Don't forget "733t" . . .

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  5. "OMGWTFBBQ" = Typing acronyms is fun!

    "OBGWTFPOLARBEAR" = You either were/are a fan of Lost, or you spend enough time in internet fandom to have picked it up anyway.

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  6. Also, that last one was a genuine typo, and I pray to Gore it will not generate a new meme.

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  7. Have you not noticed the subliminal messages in the word verification images?

    catchpa: kavdswdt

    See?

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  8. OBGYN Kenobi!!!!11!!ELEVEN!!1!

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  9. You mentioned something called "real life." Could you explain what that means?

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  10. Loki:

    That's that time where you do things to keep your WoW account active.

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  11. Thought that the Z stood for Zombies as in " Zombies, Oh My God".

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  12. @kristopher: There is no RL, only AFK.

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