8 ms·

A lot of good questions to ask yourself here. But, > have you ever used/applied "internet slang" (cringe, based, cuck, chad) in/to real-life situations? I tak

A lot of good questions to ask yourself here. But, > have you ever used/applied "internet slang" (cringe, based, cuck, chad) in/to real-life situations? I take slight issue with this one. To me, there is no difference between “internet slang” and just “slang”. The internet is ubiquitous and the language we use online and offline is largely the same now. Didn’t always be this way. I still remember the first time I heard a friend say “epic fail” in really life circa 2005 or so, and it was like some sort of glass wall had been broken between our real lives and our internet lives. But that wall is long gone, and I think that’s probably okay.

wruza 4y ago
Not only gone, I’ve heard internet and/or local imageboard slang from people who surely never visited the source of it. It feels strange to conceal your own subculture from those who speak it freely.
naillo 4y ago
There are actually a huge chunk of the population that just isn't very online, and genuinely don't know these terms. (Even many young people.) It was a real eye opener to meet some 'terminally offline' people and realize you can actually just escape and things are fine without being here constantly.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  I can be online constantly and escape whatever the flavour of the month is. The only time it bites me in the ass is when I get banned for not being up to date on whatever everyone good and decent has to agree with to be good and decent.
  - athorax 4y ago
    If you are getting banned regularly from online communities you might want to reconsider why that is happening
    - tomc1985 4y ago
      Yeah, online communities reflexively "other" anyone who does not agree with their increasingly robust (aka fascist) political dogma, given that that sort of thing seems to be inescapably creeping into everything How many times have I walked by a table in a cafe to overhear someone complaining that it's impossible to be taken seriously unless you adopt extremeist left or right schools of thought? How many times have I witnessed adherents dismissing moderates or centrists? Accusing them of helping the "enemy"? What about people who think for themselves and have concluded something out of the mainstream? Throwing in some other unrelated political cause and accusing anyone who doesn't agree to be wrong? It's disgusting, and those communities should be ashamed of themselves I'm assuming, of course, that GP is a decent person and independent thinker, as those types tend to get railroaded in this glorious new dawn of political groupthink
      - wpietri 4y ago
        > glorious new dawn of political groupthink [citation needed] I don't see any reason to think that "groupthink", aka societal or subcultural values and beliefs, is at a notably higher level than much of history. In the west, look at the long dominance of the Catholic Church. Even after the rise of the Protestants, it was often more a set of competing orthodoxies, such that large groups were eager to cross oceans to get away from oppression. And when those people got to the US, quite a lot of them were eager to become the oppressors. Looks at the predominance of blue laws across the US. Look at who got tarred and feathered. Who got lynched. Who dealt with segregation and Jim Crow. Look at the Red Scare, the socially narrow dominance of mass media, or how eager and how violent the forces of conformity were in the 1950s. I think today people are generally freer that at any point. But two big things have changed. One, the rise of the internet means the one-way, conformist channels of mass media have given way to everybody talking to everybody. And two, cultural power is no longer concentrated in a narrow slice of society, such that people previously unheard are now having some things to say. I get why some people see that as "political groupthink". When you're in a dominant group, you're not used to getting challenged. But personally, I find it bracing, causing me to rethink a lot of things I took as givens because that's what the people around me believed. The death of old paradigms is always uncomfortable, but personally I'd much rather live in this era of ferment than in one where everybody believes the same comfortable old certainties.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  Makes me think it might be similar to the "I don't watch TV" or "movies" or "sports" crowds. Just any pervasive cultural activity in which some don't participate but still carry on. I remember before I deleted my FB account (I've since created a new one), my buddy said to me that I'd be ok, just that I might be strongly disconnected from culture—not necessarily to tell me to not do it, but to be aware of the potential ramifications.
  - keyle 4y ago
    Agreed partially. You have to question what "culture" are you missing on. I'm still on Facebook and let me tell you, you're not missing much in the culture department.
    - agileAlligator 4y ago
      > I'm still on Facebook and let me tell you, you're not missing much in the culture department. guy above you might have deleted his fb account in the early 2000s. right now, the culture isn't at fb, it's at places like reddit and 4chan.
      - rnd0 4y ago
        > right now, the culture isn't at fb, it's at places like reddit and 4chan The fact that people in 2022 describe 4chan as having any kind of effect on our culture should send shivers down our collective spines. /pol/ is 4chan, 4chan is /pol/
        agileAlligator 4y ago
        > The fact that people in 2022 describe 4chan as having any kind of effect on our culture should send shivers down our collective spines. 4chan has always been the undercurrent of digital culture. It's just way closer to the surface now. And contrary to popular belief, the entirety of 4chan isn't some den of degenerates and racists. People end up focusing on /b/ and /pol/, when the entire reason they were created was to quarantine that sort of discussion from infecting the rest of the boards. /fit/, /sci/, /mu/ etc are about as toxic as any subreddit.
synu 4y ago
That’s true for many words, but also sometimes you meet someone who talks like Reddit comments or in memes and it comes across really strange to me. It doesn’t sound like how people generally talk to each other in real life otherwise, at least in my experience.
- Shared404 4y ago
  I believe that thwe strangeness there comes in the syntax and conversation flow - or lack thereof. I've met people who speak with the cadence of a comment section in real life, if that makes sense. In short - I think it's not what's said, as much as how it's said.
gandutraveler 4y ago
I know someone who laughs by saying LOL instead of actually laughing. So there is a difference between slang and internet slang.
- xwdv 4y ago
  I heard someone loudly exclaim L O L at tech conference one time in real life and it just made me want to kick their ass. I had a low opinion of that person immediately.
  - jacobmischka 4y ago
    Seems like they're not the most immature one in this situation.
    - gaws 4y ago
      What do you expect from a user who claims to be "fighting for my life in the comments almost daily" on HN? el-oh-el.
      - spoils19 4y ago
        HN is the last bastion of free speech and intelligent conversation. Sorry to hear if you dislike people who want to defend that right adamantly, but myself and most other HNers who embrace the free speech, conservative model would politely, but firmly, show you the door.
        gaws 4y ago
        > myself and most other HNers who embrace the free speech, conservative model would politely, but firmly, show you the door. No one is entitled to 100% free speech protection on a moderated platform one joins by choice. If you're concerned about saying what you want without the risk of being banned, consider hosting your own forum where you have all the control. Only then you will be free.
- 4y ago
bootlooped 4y ago
I think I remember reading a Reddit post once about a girl whose boyfriend would say things in real life like "can we get some f's in the chat boys". Things that were clearly very niche and would either be completely unintelligible to the audience or at best sound out of place. I think it's a matter of reading the room.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  “F’s in the chat” doesn’t strike me as a particularly obscure meme.
  - bootlooped 4y ago
    If you went to some public place with a fairly representative sample of the population, like a supermarket or something, and asked 100 people about that phrase, how many do you think would know provenance of it?
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Never heard it before. After a couple of seconds of pondering, I assumed it meant "females" but I can see from other replies that is wrong.
      - suby 4y ago
        It's from a Call of Duty video game. The game had a scene where you were at a characters funeral, and a prompt came up saying "Press F to Pay Respects". This was widely criticized and mocked by players, and it spread from there to be used to either legitimately convey respect or to sarcastically mock something.
  - zach_garwood 4y ago
    Never heard it. What does it mean? Is it like a Slack shortcut?
    - 4y ago
iveqy 4y ago
During the piratebay trial, one of the founders got a question about if he had met someone IRL. He replied with that they don't use that expression but AFK (away from keyboard) instead. Becuase IRL (in real life) suggests that internet is not real life, but it is. What we do online effects our every day life even when we are offline. I thought that was very sane thinking
- whatshisface 4y ago
  When you are running the Pirate Bay the internet is real life, and it also is when you have a business, but when you are on an MMORPG or Twitter it is real life to a much lesser degree. How can we distinguish between them? Well, the majority of relationships made on MMORPGs or Twitter go nowhere outside the platform, and the things that people discuss on them also tend to not involve anything that will still be there when the person logs off. That creates a pocket universe (with a few exceptions, I think some people have met their spouses on MMORPGs) unrelated to the real one. Operating Pirate Bay, or even talking about Linux kernel drivers on IRC, doesn't meet that criteria of being separate from real life.
  - leetcrew 4y ago
    plenty of "real life" places also fail this test though. most work/school relationships don't "go anywhere" outside of that bubble. what fraction of people you hung out with in school or ate lunch with at previous jobs do you still actually talk to? how much of the code you wrote still runs in production?
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      Hopefully the money you make at work bleeds out into real life. :-) Also, I think a lot of people stay in touch with their college friends. Besides that, the recognition that your school or office is a bubble universe in certain ways sounds like an important one. You sound like you're attempting to refute the idea but I think you're making a good point. Someone who implicitly thought their highschool was the whole universe would be in bad shape when they graduated.
night-rider 4y ago
I regularly say 'n00b' in real-life, and 'pwned', pronouncing the 'p'
BbzzbB 4y ago
I live in a French speaking place and I wager vast majority knows these terms (am millennial) and a lot even use them here and there, in their English forms. Tho of course not all and there are "deeper" slangs that are more for people online enough to share some web culture. IMO, Internet slang is accurate as it transcends geography while there is some locality to slangs and vernacular.
extheat 4y ago
I disagree, the difference is still there. It’s gotten a bit smaller, but it’s still there. Some people who are perpetually online on forums will say things like “that’s based” in real life, but out of a diverse group of 100 people how many do you think would understand and say things like that? I’d wager a lot of people may have heard before but probably don’t understand what it means. There’s also lots of localized real life slang that people on forums won’t get. You still might hear it on Instagram or places like that, but there is no ubiquity there. I don’t think it’s changed significantly beyond exposure with more people being on TikTok/Instagram/YouTube and similar networks.
coldtea 4y ago
>I take slight issue with this one. To me, there is no difference between “internet slang” and just “slang”. The internet is ubiquitous and the language we use online and offline is largely the same now. Some yes, otherwise you'd be surprised... In many circles and communities it's not the same at all - and even developments the 'social media'-inmates take for well known, are not a thing discussed at all... It's like the "silent majority" of working programmers, who don't give a duck about HN, Rust, the latest trends in web and backend, and so on...

wruza 4y ago

Not only gone, I’ve heard internet and/or local imageboard slang from people who surely never visited the source of it. It feels strange to conceal your own subculture from those who speak it freely.

naillo 4y ago

There are actually a huge chunk of the population that just isn't very online, and genuinely don't know these terms. (Even many young people.) It was a real eye opener to meet some 'terminally offline' people and realize you can actually just escape and things are fine without being here constantly.

thrown_22 4y ago
I can be online constantly and escape whatever the flavour of the month is. The only time it bites me in the ass is when I get banned for not being up to date on whatever everyone good and decent has to agree with to be good and decent.
- athorax 4y ago
  If you are getting banned regularly from online communities you might want to reconsider why that is happening
  - tomc1985 4y ago
    Yeah, online communities reflexively "other" anyone who does not agree with their increasingly robust (aka fascist) political dogma, given that that sort of thing seems to be inescapably creeping into everything How many times have I walked by a table in a cafe to overhear someone complaining that it's impossible to be taken seriously unless you adopt extremeist left or right schools of thought? How many times have I witnessed adherents dismissing moderates or centrists? Accusing them of helping the "enemy"? What about people who think for themselves and have concluded something out of the mainstream? Throwing in some other unrelated political cause and accusing anyone who doesn't agree to be wrong? It's disgusting, and those communities should be ashamed of themselves I'm assuming, of course, that GP is a decent person and independent thinker, as those types tend to get railroaded in this glorious new dawn of political groupthink
    - wpietri 4y ago
      > glorious new dawn of political groupthink [citation needed] I don't see any reason to think that "groupthink", aka societal or subcultural values and beliefs, is at a notably higher level than much of history. In the west, look at the long dominance of the Catholic Church. Even after the rise of the Protestants, it was often more a set of competing orthodoxies, such that large groups were eager to cross oceans to get away from oppression. And when those people got to the US, quite a lot of them were eager to become the oppressors. Looks at the predominance of blue laws across the US. Look at who got tarred and feathered. Who got lynched. Who dealt with segregation and Jim Crow. Look at the Red Scare, the socially narrow dominance of mass media, or how eager and how violent the forces of conformity were in the 1950s. I think today people are generally freer that at any point. But two big things have changed. One, the rise of the internet means the one-way, conformist channels of mass media have given way to everybody talking to everybody. And two, cultural power is no longer concentrated in a narrow slice of society, such that people previously unheard are now having some things to say. I get why some people see that as "political groupthink". When you're in a dominant group, you're not used to getting challenged. But personally, I find it bracing, causing me to rethink a lot of things I took as givens because that's what the people around me believed. The death of old paradigms is always uncomfortable, but personally I'd much rather live in this era of ferment than in one where everybody believes the same comfortable old certainties.
jimkleiber 4y ago
Makes me think it might be similar to the "I don't watch TV" or "movies" or "sports" crowds. Just any pervasive cultural activity in which some don't participate but still carry on. I remember before I deleted my FB account (I've since created a new one), my buddy said to me that I'd be ok, just that I might be strongly disconnected from culture—not necessarily to tell me to not do it, but to be aware of the potential ramifications.
- keyle 4y ago
  Agreed partially. You have to question what "culture" are you missing on. I'm still on Facebook and let me tell you, you're not missing much in the culture department.
  - agileAlligator 4y ago
    > I'm still on Facebook and let me tell you, you're not missing much in the culture department. guy above you might have deleted his fb account in the early 2000s. right now, the culture isn't at fb, it's at places like reddit and 4chan.
    - rnd0 4y ago
      > right now, the culture isn't at fb, it's at places like reddit and 4chan The fact that people in 2022 describe 4chan as having any kind of effect on our culture should send shivers down our collective spines. /pol/ is 4chan, 4chan is /pol/
      - agileAlligator 4y ago
        > The fact that people in 2022 describe 4chan as having any kind of effect on our culture should send shivers down our collective spines. 4chan has always been the undercurrent of digital culture. It's just way closer to the surface now. And contrary to popular belief, the entirety of 4chan isn't some den of degenerates and racists. People end up focusing on /b/ and /pol/, when the entire reason they were created was to quarantine that sort of discussion from infecting the rest of the boards. /fit/, /sci/, /mu/ etc are about as toxic as any subreddit.

synu 4y ago

That’s true for many words, but also sometimes you meet someone who talks like Reddit comments or in memes and it comes across really strange to me. It doesn’t sound like how people generally talk to each other in real life otherwise, at least in my experience.

Shared404 4y ago
I believe that thwe strangeness there comes in the syntax and conversation flow - or lack thereof. I've met people who speak with the cadence of a comment section in real life, if that makes sense. In short - I think it's not what's said, as much as how it's said.

gandutraveler 4y ago

I know someone who laughs by saying LOL instead of actually laughing. So there is a difference between slang and internet slang.

xwdv 4y ago
I heard someone loudly exclaim L O L at tech conference one time in real life and it just made me want to kick their ass. I had a low opinion of that person immediately.
- jacobmischka 4y ago
  Seems like they're not the most immature one in this situation.
  - gaws 4y ago
    What do you expect from a user who claims to be "fighting for my life in the comments almost daily" on HN? el-oh-el.
    - spoils19 4y ago
      HN is the last bastion of free speech and intelligent conversation. Sorry to hear if you dislike people who want to defend that right adamantly, but myself and most other HNers who embrace the free speech, conservative model would politely, but firmly, show you the door.
      - gaws 4y ago
        > myself and most other HNers who embrace the free speech, conservative model would politely, but firmly, show you the door. No one is entitled to 100% free speech protection on a moderated platform one joins by choice. If you're concerned about saying what you want without the risk of being banned, consider hosting your own forum where you have all the control. Only then you will be free.
4y ago

bootlooped 4y ago

I think I remember reading a Reddit post once about a girl whose boyfriend would say things in real life like "can we get some f's in the chat boys". Things that were clearly very niche and would either be completely unintelligible to the audience or at best sound out of place. I think it's a matter of reading the room.

Tijdreiziger 4y ago
“F’s in the chat” doesn’t strike me as a particularly obscure meme.
- bootlooped 4y ago
  If you went to some public place with a fairly representative sample of the population, like a supermarket or something, and asked 100 people about that phrase, how many do you think would know provenance of it?
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Never heard it before. After a couple of seconds of pondering, I assumed it meant "females" but I can see from other replies that is wrong.
    - suby 4y ago
      It's from a Call of Duty video game. The game had a scene where you were at a characters funeral, and a prompt came up saying "Press F to Pay Respects". This was widely criticized and mocked by players, and it spread from there to be used to either legitimately convey respect or to sarcastically mock something.
- zach_garwood 4y ago
  Never heard it. What does it mean? Is it like a Slack shortcut?
  - 4y ago

iveqy 4y ago

During the piratebay trial, one of the founders got a question about if he had met someone IRL. He replied with that they don't use that expression but AFK (away from keyboard) instead. Becuase IRL (in real life) suggests that internet is not real life, but it is. What we do online effects our every day life even when we are offline. I thought that was very sane thinking

whatshisface 4y ago
When you are running the Pirate Bay the internet is real life, and it also is when you have a business, but when you are on an MMORPG or Twitter it is real life to a much lesser degree. How can we distinguish between them? Well, the majority of relationships made on MMORPGs or Twitter go nowhere outside the platform, and the things that people discuss on them also tend to not involve anything that will still be there when the person logs off. That creates a pocket universe (with a few exceptions, I think some people have met their spouses on MMORPGs) unrelated to the real one. Operating Pirate Bay, or even talking about Linux kernel drivers on IRC, doesn't meet that criteria of being separate from real life.
- leetcrew 4y ago
  plenty of "real life" places also fail this test though. most work/school relationships don't "go anywhere" outside of that bubble. what fraction of people you hung out with in school or ate lunch with at previous jobs do you still actually talk to? how much of the code you wrote still runs in production?
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Hopefully the money you make at work bleeds out into real life. :-) Also, I think a lot of people stay in touch with their college friends. Besides that, the recognition that your school or office is a bubble universe in certain ways sounds like an important one. You sound like you're attempting to refute the idea but I think you're making a good point. Someone who implicitly thought their highschool was the whole universe would be in bad shape when they graduated.

night-rider 4y ago

I regularly say 'n00b' in real-life, and 'pwned', pronouncing the 'p'

BbzzbB 4y ago

I live in a French speaking place and I wager vast majority knows these terms (am millennial) and a lot even use them here and there, in their English forms. Tho of course not all and there are "deeper" slangs that are more for people online enough to share some web culture. IMO, Internet slang is accurate as it transcends geography while there is some locality to slangs and vernacular.

extheat 4y ago

I disagree, the difference is still there. It’s gotten a bit smaller, but it’s still there. Some people who are perpetually online on forums will say things like “that’s based” in real life, but out of a diverse group of 100 people how many do you think would understand and say things like that? I’d wager a lot of people may have heard before but probably don’t understand what it means. There’s also lots of localized real life slang that people on forums won’t get. You still might hear it on Instagram or places like that, but there is no ubiquity there. I don’t think it’s changed significantly beyond exposure with more people being on TikTok/Instagram/YouTube and similar networks.

coldtea 4y ago

>I take slight issue with this one. To me, there is no difference between “internet slang” and just “slang”. The internet is ubiquitous and the language we use online and offline is largely the same now. Some yes, otherwise you'd be surprised... In many circles and communities it's not the same at all - and even developments the 'social media'-inmates take for well known, are not a thing discussed at all... It's like the "silent majority" of working programmers, who don't give a duck about HN, Rust, the latest trends in web and backend, and so on...