Monday, November 10, 2008

Linguistics of nerdery

Ever wonder where those Internet shorthand terms come from? No? Well, apparently some people do. Here's a story from PC World magazine about Net shorthand. Interestingly, some of the terms, such as ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing) and its many derivatives predate the explosion of the World Wide Web. ROFL dates back to at least 1989 on Usenet forums. Some other terms, like FWIW (for what it's worth) actually have their origins in office culture rather than the Web.


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