understanding people's messages
Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 3:43 am
(forum = message board, discussion board etc)
(messages = posts)
abbreviations are a constant problem -- the most important one is GIYF (Google Is Your Friend) -- in other words if you don't know something, look it up -- go to http://www.google.com and enter a suitable query term such as -
PMSL net slang
ROFLMAO "net slang"
QFT internet lingo
IMHO abbreviations
WTF "meaning of" netslang
~~~~~~~~~~~~
(i've capitalised the abbreviations in the query terms for clarity -- when i do web searches on Google, Yahoo or MSN i usually type the query term all in lower case, on the assumption that searches aren't case sensitive unless that option is chosen -- but if the search is important i'd use capitals as appropriate, cos even if the top results aren't affected, i suspect that sometimes the lower results might be)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
(tip - if you don't want to "lose" a page when you click on a link, right click and select "Open in New Window" -- to get back to the original page from the new window, you can use the keyboard shortcut Alt-Tab -- this shows you all your open windows -- reclicking the Tab key while holding down the Alt key allows you to chose the window you want to view)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
(tip - the default setting on Google is to use moderate filtering to exclude some adult content -- filtering isn't perfect and can exclude inoffensive relevant results -- to remove filtering, click on the "Preferences" link to the right of the search box -- the other thing i tweak is the number of search results per page -- i prefer 20)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
when the search results page come up, there's often no need to click on the links cos the explanation will probably be in one or other of the top half dozen associated page descriptions
another problem on forums is people not understanding each other cos they don't know each other and/or can't see/hear each other and/or don't have a common language -- (this is especially true with English forums cos English is used online by many non native english speakers) -- so (for instance), sarcasm, irony etc are almost certain to be misunderstood -- the rule of thumb is, if it's possible to misunderstand something, then chances are it will be misunderstood -- in 1982 Scott Fahlman suggested using the basic smiley, and this helped a lot, tho most of the complicated smilies to be found in smiley dictionaries are probably more trouble than they're worth -- modern message boads have graphics facilities, and visual smilies (small animated gifs) are usually available which helps prevent confusion -- however, it's still a leap of faith to assume that what's written will be understood the way it was meant, even with the best of intentions and the simplest of messages
that being said, there are tens of thousands of well established message boards dedicated to a particular online community (eg chess players or international terrorists or frog fetishists* or people suffering from depression or whatever) -- these quickly develop local 'dialects' with have their own expressions and specialist vocabularies -- one word that's common to nearly all of them is "noobie" (sometimes abbreviated to "noob") meaning someone who is new to that particular area of the internet
there are also language problems associated with the cultural history of the net, which grew out of the bulletin boards of the 80s, which in turn grew out of ham radio and early computer comms -- (BT's Prestel and Compuserve's Micronet were two of the early commercially available networks) -- the bulletin boards were mainly populated by 1) nerds (geeks) many of whom spoke fluent UNIX (the commonest operating system used by college computing depts), and 2) phone phreakers (telephone hackers) -- the former talked mainly in technical jargon and computerese, and the latter talked mainly in code (to avoid being caught) -- this had a huge influence, tho of course the net is continually changing -- eg L337 (aka leetspeak) is now so common amongst script kiddies that many h4x0rz (leet for "hackers") consider it totally uncool, and it could soon become the internet's first endangered 'language'
into this mix came a population which grew up with mobile phones and texting, where brevity was a necessity, and they happily adapted to existing acronyms and shortened words as well as introducing many of their own -- an example of word compression is "thankyou" -- this was abbreviated to "thanks", then "thnks", then "thnx", then "thx" and finally "tx" -- mobiles are increasing used to access the net, so it will be interesting to see whether these 2 "sub languages" converge
by the early 90s there were 4 main areas of online communication - IRC (Internet Relay Chat), the Newsgroups (Usenet), email and MUD (multi-user dungeons) -- despite (or more likely because of) their simplicity, these are all still going strong -- and as they tend to use plain (ASCII) text which is easy for any computer to understand, they'll probably be around for a long time to come
the classic RTFM page shows several things mentioned above (eg the example text in the "Symptoms" section purports to come from an IRC session) -- PS don't bother following the links on that version of the page
* frogs are surprisingly popular -- my frog pic on Facebook's "Owned!" app is currently valued at $138,081,000
(messages = posts)
abbreviations are a constant problem -- the most important one is GIYF (Google Is Your Friend) -- in other words if you don't know something, look it up -- go to http://www.google.com and enter a suitable query term such as -
PMSL net slang
ROFLMAO "net slang"
QFT internet lingo
IMHO abbreviations
WTF "meaning of" netslang
~~~~~~~~~~~~
(i've capitalised the abbreviations in the query terms for clarity -- when i do web searches on Google, Yahoo or MSN i usually type the query term all in lower case, on the assumption that searches aren't case sensitive unless that option is chosen -- but if the search is important i'd use capitals as appropriate, cos even if the top results aren't affected, i suspect that sometimes the lower results might be)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
(tip - if you don't want to "lose" a page when you click on a link, right click and select "Open in New Window" -- to get back to the original page from the new window, you can use the keyboard shortcut Alt-Tab -- this shows you all your open windows -- reclicking the Tab key while holding down the Alt key allows you to chose the window you want to view)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
(tip - the default setting on Google is to use moderate filtering to exclude some adult content -- filtering isn't perfect and can exclude inoffensive relevant results -- to remove filtering, click on the "Preferences" link to the right of the search box -- the other thing i tweak is the number of search results per page -- i prefer 20)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
when the search results page come up, there's often no need to click on the links cos the explanation will probably be in one or other of the top half dozen associated page descriptions
another problem on forums is people not understanding each other cos they don't know each other and/or can't see/hear each other and/or don't have a common language -- (this is especially true with English forums cos English is used online by many non native english speakers) -- so (for instance), sarcasm, irony etc are almost certain to be misunderstood -- the rule of thumb is, if it's possible to misunderstand something, then chances are it will be misunderstood -- in 1982 Scott Fahlman suggested using the basic smiley, and this helped a lot, tho most of the complicated smilies to be found in smiley dictionaries are probably more trouble than they're worth -- modern message boads have graphics facilities, and visual smilies (small animated gifs) are usually available which helps prevent confusion -- however, it's still a leap of faith to assume that what's written will be understood the way it was meant, even with the best of intentions and the simplest of messages
that being said, there are tens of thousands of well established message boards dedicated to a particular online community (eg chess players or international terrorists or frog fetishists* or people suffering from depression or whatever) -- these quickly develop local 'dialects' with have their own expressions and specialist vocabularies -- one word that's common to nearly all of them is "noobie" (sometimes abbreviated to "noob") meaning someone who is new to that particular area of the internet
there are also language problems associated with the cultural history of the net, which grew out of the bulletin boards of the 80s, which in turn grew out of ham radio and early computer comms -- (BT's Prestel and Compuserve's Micronet were two of the early commercially available networks) -- the bulletin boards were mainly populated by 1) nerds (geeks) many of whom spoke fluent UNIX (the commonest operating system used by college computing depts), and 2) phone phreakers (telephone hackers) -- the former talked mainly in technical jargon and computerese, and the latter talked mainly in code (to avoid being caught) -- this had a huge influence, tho of course the net is continually changing -- eg L337 (aka leetspeak) is now so common amongst script kiddies that many h4x0rz (leet for "hackers") consider it totally uncool, and it could soon become the internet's first endangered 'language'
into this mix came a population which grew up with mobile phones and texting, where brevity was a necessity, and they happily adapted to existing acronyms and shortened words as well as introducing many of their own -- an example of word compression is "thankyou" -- this was abbreviated to "thanks", then "thnks", then "thnx", then "thx" and finally "tx" -- mobiles are increasing used to access the net, so it will be interesting to see whether these 2 "sub languages" converge
by the early 90s there were 4 main areas of online communication - IRC (Internet Relay Chat), the Newsgroups (Usenet), email and MUD (multi-user dungeons) -- despite (or more likely because of) their simplicity, these are all still going strong -- and as they tend to use plain (ASCII) text which is easy for any computer to understand, they'll probably be around for a long time to come
the classic RTFM page shows several things mentioned above (eg the example text in the "Symptoms" section purports to come from an IRC session) -- PS don't bother following the links on that version of the page
* frogs are surprisingly popular -- my frog pic on Facebook's "Owned!" app is currently valued at $138,081,000