Typographical Internet Jokes
Below are a few “jokes” born out of the idiosyncrasies of communicating online. Also note that I’ve done every one of these at some time. I know I’m missing a bunch. So please add more in the comments.
1. Exclamation points!!!!1!!!1!!1one1!!!
I saw this one on Slashdot first (someone needs to do a blog post on general Slashdot humor). The “!1one” actually has an entry in the Urban Dictionary, which explains it pretty well:
Used in long uses of exclamation marks, the !1one is an intentional mistake that jokes about the appearance of numeral value “1″ in exclamation overdoses. This is due to the shift key not consistantly being pressed while tapping “1″ for the overused “!”’s. The intentional error may signify even more exclamation marks, like some kind of lunatic scientific notation. !1one may= !E9 or !*10^9, thus representing an absurd amount of exclamation.
2. Strike-through Jokes Joke Attempts
I imagine the practical origin of these jokes are real edits, where the author wanted to leave the original wording intact to denote the edit. However, a lot of strike-through “edits” are made before the first publishing with the intention of making a joke. Jokes like these are very similar to those in the “I’m not saying any names (Jason), but someone…” family. Here’s some strike-through action I did in an earlier post on this blog:
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3. Super-long Acronyms. ITLSDLATKOAYPTYA
Acronyms are great time savers in IM conversations. First there was ROTF, which stands for “rolling on the floor”. Then there was LMAO, which stands for “laughing my ass off”. And then some genius put them together to get, ROTFLMAO or “rolling on the floor laughing my ass off”. Acronyms as long as these encourage people to make up their own super-long acronyms. Mine above stands for “I’m talking like super-duper long acronymns. The kind of acronyms your parents told you about.” Next time you’re in an IM conversation with someone, try to throw a few of these super-longs in. It’s actually pretty amazing how well you can understand these, even when they’re made up on the fly.
4. Lots of links next to each other.
Another one I saw at Slashdot first. Excessive linking isn’t always meant as a joke, but there is often some humor with how the words connect to the material they are linking to. Chris Messina is one link-happy blogger who uses this technique a lot on his blog. Here are a few examples.
December 6th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
That’s an interesting take…
I was talking to someone about this the other day — and I realized that it’s essentially “orthagonal” linking… or “writing along the z-axis”. It’s kinda like a variable that stands for something else… especially when I link to myself, it’s a way of saying, in very few words, what I said before without having to repeat it all again.
Heh.
December 6th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
Chris, on second reading, I realize that what I wrote about you may come across the wrong way (especially that “link-happy” bit and the fact that I left out “isn’t” in “Excessive linking _isn’t_ always meant as a joke”).
I seriously enjoy and appreciate the linking you do in your posts. The links accomplish exactly what you are talking about… As someone who may not have read everything you’ve written, it’s a concise way to get your whole opinion and perspective on the topic at hand. Both by linking to your past writings and by linking to things that are part of your “knowledge base” (websites and Wikipedia entries). I’m pretty sure that you don’t always consciously recognize that you are putting 3 or 4 links in a row; you’re really just trying to embed as much useful information as possible into your posts.
I mean linking is what the “web” is all about. It’s what makes a blog post better than a newspaper article (one of the things anyway). And it’s incredibly useful. Keep it up.