Internet Slang of Yesteryear

[ivy]

XD is good. When my friends text me XD I feel comfort. When they text lol I feel the opposite.

[Memory]

I still occasionally use the word "

grok

", but I haven't seen it used much in decades.

So, for your convenience:

grok (v.)
1. to understand sth. or sb. intuitively
2. to grasp sth.'s or sb.'s essence, meaning or reason

Example 1: "Plenty of newer TTRPG players don't grok the concept of old-school dungeon crawlers and why characters should not be powerful super-heroes all of the time."
Example 2: "It took me a long time to grok the Tcl programming language, but now I can't go back to anything else!"
Example 3: "He didn't grok Julian Bashir, like, at all, so we just wouldn't fit with each other."

[dotmidi]

I still occasionally use the word "

grok

"

HOW'D YOU DO THAT  :TnT:  :TnT: you are speaking in fluent earthbound

[Memory]

HOW'D YOU DO THAT  :TnT:  :TnT: you are speaking in fluent earthbound

The BBCode editor has been updated recently! The disk-looking button in the top row (above the smileys) makes things

spin

!

There's also blinking and moving!

[dotmidi]

WOWEE

[Memory]

WOWEE

The FitnessGram Pacer test is a multistage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues. The 20 meter Pacer test will begin in 30 seconds. Line up at the start. The running speed starts slowly, but gets faster each minute after you hear this signal *boop*. A single lap should be completed each time you hear this sound *ding*. Remember to run in a straight line, and run as long as possible. The second time you fail to complete a lap before the sound, your test is over. The test will begin on the word start. On your mark, get ready, start.

[debleb]

The BBCode editor has been updated recently! The disk-looking button in the top row (above the smileys) makes things

spin

!

There's also blinking and moving!

WHAAAAAT?!

COOL!

[Cobra!]

POV: You’re about to put on your favourite album

[Memory]

I think another piece of slang is "netizen". I always kind of liked that.

[Zusk]

Been reading Master's of Doom recently, here is a few things I have pulled from that:
Back in the 90's. The term "The Information Super Highway" was actually pretty common! 

Also, here's a special one. A list of all - mostly - defunct terms from back in the early days of MIT's CIT department. A relic from that really oldschool, vintage 'hacker' culture that's mostly gone now.

https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

[moon]

*glomps u*

ohhhhh goodness that takes me back 

the main ones i remember off the top of my head have to do with stealing other people's graphics, layouts, photos etc. if you stole someone else's stuff you were a "biter" and people put warnings on their splash pages "no biters" "no sticky paws".

oh and we called ourselves webmistresses.

[dotmidi]

I haven't seen the term "Grebo" in ages xD

[Memory]

webmistresses

I knew a nonbinary creator who went by webmattress.

[doubleincision]

not exactly slang, but you generally can tell how old any particular netizen (i love that word) is by whether they say "username", "account", "login", "handle", etc to refer to the same concept
 
also, remember when we used to attach the -ie/-y suffix to everything online? signatures were Siggies, affiliates were Affies, links got called Linkies—user A would say "i found this cool website", and user B would say "linkies?" to mean can you share the link? on Neopets, it was a common thing for people to keep a gallery of screenshots of funny or weird things they saw around the website, and even the word "screenshots" became Screenies. everything had to have that cutesy little suffix on it. can't say i miss that, i always thought it was annoying hahaha

some other ones that were once super common, but i never see anymore:

• OMGWTFBBQ: "oh my god, what the fuck, barbecue". it basically just meant a particularly excited "OMFG", and it was often used in the same way as ZOMG, to make fun of people who would overuse OMFG.
• jaggies: this one was used a lot in pixel art spaces. jaggies are extra pixels that make the pixel art look jagged and are/were considered aesthetically unappealing. i'm working on a pixel art piece right now so that's why i was thinking of this one :p
• w00t: it's like woo! yay! yippee! hurray!
• pwning: this was back when people used to say "owned" to mean, like, someone got one over on you. you're playing Smash with your school buddy, he wins, he says i just totally OWNED your ass! but online, in the heat of the moment, people would typo owned as pwned, and because typos are always funny, it became its own slang word!

Been reading Master's of Doom recently, here is a few things I have pulled from that:
Back in the 90's. The term "The Information Super Highway" was actually pretty common! 

Also, here's a special one. A list of all - mostly - defunct terms from back in the early days of MIT's CIT department. A relic from that really oldschool, vintage 'hacker' culture that's mostly gone now.

https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

i love the phrase Information Super Highway, it makes the internet sound so radical and cool lol

that jargon.txt page is amazing. i would love to see real-life examples of these words being used, because there's so much here that it's basically its own dialect of English! i have to wonder if people in this little subculture actually spoke like that, or if there's some degree of comedic exaggeration being done, here. i think we should bring this particular term back into regular use:

HUNGUS (hung'ghis) [perhaps related to current slang "humongous"; which one came first (if either) is unclear] adj. Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code." "This is a hungus set of modifications."

[bingus_baby]

I'm just glad were past the era of people saying 'lol' out loud, in real life, to be honest 

*sweats profusely* y-yeah... we're past that...
Okay, I'll be honest, I never sopped saying "lmao" out loud, and my friends *did* call me out on it. But I do not care, and I still say it lmao (As well as end nearly every sentence with it to indicate a more light-hearted tone, sort of like primitive tone indicators.)


Anyways!! On topic!! I like to use the "only slightly outdated enough to be not cool but also not ironically cool" internet slang and little emoticons. I've been using :3 a bit too much since the "holy bingle" meme popped up, and I've also started to bring back ;;;;;; which I think might have been popular with certain people around 2016? It was heavily used in Mystic Messenger, so I see it as sort of a callback to my degenerate past! I can't think of anything else at the moment, but I've also become numb to most of my typing quirks lmao

And for words, it rotates. But I'll be scrolling through old iCloud backups from years ago and see a meme or two I forgot about and start referencing it a bit too much. I'm the kind of person to choose a word to use non-stop for a week before tossin' it back into the closet to rediscover years later! This was another thing my friends would call me out on. Trust me, it gets annoying when I find a cool, new word.