Another repurposed technical tool for adding playful commentary is the exclamation!compound used to refer to different versions of a particular person, such as past!me or CAPSLOCK!Harry.* Exclamation!compounds take us into a fascinating corner of technological history. Back before we were all on one thoroughly interwoven internet, in order to send someone an email you had to specify exactly which path of connected computers it should take. Alex in the math department at Princeton might be princeton!math!alex—so your computer sends it to the big Princeton server, which passes it to the “math” computer, which contains an “Alex” account. This system was easily extended to personal descriptions. Just as you could keep track of your various friends named Alex depending on their interests (Alex the mathematician versus Alex the artist), you could also distinguish them based on their computer paths (art!alex versus math!alex).*
Technically speaking, this system was rather clumsy. Who wants to memorize paths of networked computers just to send a message? By the time most people started going online, internet architecture had gotten more densely webbed and invisible to its users, so all you needed to do was specify a username at a domain, and hidden technology would route it through an appropriate path. But fans of the 1990s hit TV show The X-Files had started chatting with each other on Usenet discussion boards during the heyday of bang!path email addresses, so they also began referring to different versions of the main characters as Action!Mulder and Action!Scully, to differentiate them from the scenes where the characters were just standing around talking. The X-Files eventually went off the air, fan communities moved from Usenet to LiveJournal to Tumblr, and email addresses gained their [email protected] format, but fans persisted in the social convention of referring to versions of people and characters as angst!Draco or future!me, even though many fans of Harry Potter and more recent stories had never even seen a bang!path email address.
Some expressive typography emerged into the mainstream, like spoken hashtag and sparkly punctuation. Other kinds remained a marker of a particular community, like joke code, lengthening tildes, exclamation!compounds, and others not catalogued here or even invented yet. But regardless, the repurposing of technical tools as social in-jokes goes a long way towards making the internet feel not chilly and impersonal, not shouty, not even just politely cheerful, but like a place where we can belong.
Meaning in Absence
Sarcasm, online as well as off, involves saying the opposite of what you mean in a way that still conveys your true opinion: “Well, isn’t that just terrific!” in response to bad news, or “Thanks, Sherlock!” in response to a very obvious deduction. In writing, it’s harder to make your true intention shine through without the full range of eloquent pause, verbal inflection, arched eyebrow, and wry lip we can employ in person. Irony is subtle and contextual, the ultimate in-joke.
People noticed this problem long before the internet, and many had attempted to remedy it, a history chronicled in the book Shady Characters by Keith Houston. There was Henry Denham, a British printer who used a mirrored question mark (؟) to distinguish rhetorical questions in 1575, and John Wilkins, a British natural philosopher, who proposed an inverted exclamation mark (¡) to indicate irony in 1668. After them, there were three centuries of French writers proposing variously shaped “points d’ironie”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted the need for one in 1781, Alcanter de Brahm in 1899 proposed another version of ؟, and Hervé Bazin in 1966 proposed the Greek letter ψ with a dot below. In more recent years, a backwards-slanting italics known as “ironics” or “sartalics” was attributed to several American newspaper columnists in the latter half of the twentieth century, the upside-down exclamation mark (¡) was again proposed in 2004, this time by a former writer for The Onion, and in 2010, a swirl with a dot in the middle was patented under the name SarcMark and sold for noncommercial use at the bargain (؟) price of $1.99.
All to no avail.
The problem with adopting new irony punctuation is that if the people reading you don’t understand it, you’re no better off than without it. Pointing out after the fact that you’re using a new sarcasm punctuation mark is about as much fun as explaining the joke. It’s even worse if the people receiving your sarcastic messages have to pay two bucks and install a new font just so they can have your joke explained.
Mock code or #sarcasm hashtags require no explanation, fee, or font installation, and have indeed caught on to some extent, but both can be a trifle obvious. After all, the point of sarcasm is the double meaning, the innuendo, the sous-entendu. If we wanted to make all our messages completely lucid, we already have a very effective tool for that, and it’s called Not Being Sarcastic. Rather than a single bright flag to festoon all our ironic sentences, we needed a range of ways to gently hint that there was more meaning than one might assume at first glance.
Fortunately, the range of expressive punctuation had expanded enough to do just that. Some ironic indicators that play around with typographical signals of authority predated the internet, like “scare quotes” and Satirical Brand Names and Legalese™. Ironic Capitals may be Very Old Indeed, such as this 1926 quote from Winnie-the-Pooh.
“Thank you, Pooh,” answered Eeyore. “You’re a real friend,” said he. “Not like Some,” he said.
The ironic punctuation mark that the social internet can truly claim as its own is the ~sarcasm tilde. It derives, in broad terms, from the enthusiastic ~*sparkles*~ that had decorated status updates on AOL and MSN Messenger or profile pages on MySpace or Xanga. Excavating how it became ironic is a walk through the history of this social corner. We begin on Urban Dictionary, that user-contributed slang website which is probably where you end up when you finally admit defeat and google some new acronym you can’t quite figure out.
But to use Urban Dictionary for data, we must first acknowledge its limitations. Entries on Urban Dictionary do pass through the barest of volunteer editor checks, keeping out spam and complete nonsense, but there’s no “citation needed” on Urban Dictionary the way there is on Wikipedia, despite both being user-edited projects. This openness is both Urban Dictionary’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. A word can be added years before it hits the kind of mainstream sources required by a conventional dictionary, when it might be popular only with a single friend group. But other words are added that never gain popularity or were jokes from the beginning. This means we can’t use Urban Dictionary to prove that a term is genuinely being used: just look up practically any first name and you’ll get the same sorts of entries, either highly flattering or highly insulting, all presumably targeted at specific, unknown people whose friends apparently wanted to tell them, “Look, it’s in the dictionary that you’re like that!”
Looking up a word that we’ve already seen, as many of us do from time to time, avoids this problem because we can weigh the definitions against the context we already have. But here, too, there’s an important caveat to make: many definitions are overtly racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive. It’s not just people pranking their friends: the entries for names of celebrities that are black, female, or both show levels of vitriol that would put a YouTube comments section to shame. The same goes for slang that is associated with young women or African Americans: for example, in the entries for “bae,” although several definitions accurately note its connections to “babe” and “before anyone else,” many also seem to take a perverse delight in mentioning that bæ is the Danish word for “poop.” There seems to be a correlation between how genuinely popular a word is and how much Urban Dictionary’s definition writers despise it and the people who use it.
For the sarcasm tilde, I’m interested in an Urban Dictionary strategy that goes a level deeper still. In this case, we already know both the item and its meaning, and all we’re looking for is the automatically generated, unfakable datestamp for when the two first became associated. As long as we also bear in mind that the site was founded in 1999 and took a few years to accumu
late a base level of entries, Urban Dictionary can offer a unique perspective on tracking the history of slang that entered English after the early 2000s, several years before social media sites became popular. What’s key here is that Urban Dictionary includes entries for a wide range of special characters, making it especially useful for tracking down rising meanings of symbols that had long been in use for other purposes.
As a proof of concept, let’s compare the Urban Dictionary timelines for two relatively known quantities: passive-aggressive uses of “lol” and the period symbol. In 2003, a user defined the symbol . as “Ends a fucking sentence.” But in 2009, another user defined it as: “the new cool way to emphasize (usually moody-ass) sarcasm.” We can see how disdain maps onto popularity: in 2003, the disdain is for the reader, for looking up a punctuation mark with no slang meaning, while in 2009, the disdain has shifted to the user of the slang. Once present, the sarcasm meaning showed up again in definitions from other users, suggesting that the trend was gaining hold. It took a solid couple years before New York magazine ran a thinkpiece about the rising passive-aggressive potential of the period in 2013. In contrast, “lol,” which we know from the previous chapter arose in the 1980s and was dubiously sincere by 2001, contains no such shift: from its earliest entries, users note that it officially stands for “laughing out loud” but “nobody laughs out loud when they say it.”
For the tilde ~ symbol, there were several Urban Dictionary entries for it before 2008, such as “used at the end of words to make them longer” in 2007, but none of them mention sarcasm. The first time an Urban Dictionary entry mentioned sarcasm was in 2008 (giving the example “OMG that’s soo cool~”), followed by two more entries mentioning sarcasm in 2009. There’s our timeline. But for meaning, what’s interesting about the evolution of the ~sarcasm tilde~ was that you could figure it out without Urban Dictionary at all.
In fact, we have evidence that several people did. Two LiveJournal threads from 2010 and 2012 discussed this new use of the tilde, in contexts like “Well, isn’t that ~special” or “Every character on that show has a ~tragic past~.” Both threads were started by people asking about the meaning of this new use of the tilde that they’d been seeing, and yet both askers correctly deciphered its meaning in their original questions. One said, “It seems to designate some sort of irony or disagreement with what is said,” and the other, “what I am guessing is the equivalent of scare quotes.” In the discussion threads that followed, a few people still primarily recognized the tilde as “approximately” (as in ~20) or as the cheerful decorative ~*~sparkles~*~ or Japanese cute lengthening~~~ of previous years, but many also recognized them as sarcastic. How is it that sparkle sarcasm achieved such an edge over six centuries of philosophical proposals? And why did it succeed so quickly where ؟ and ¡ and fellow symbols had all failed?
The trick lies not just in ease of typing, but in layers of meaning. Sparkle sarcasm derives from sparkle enthusiasm, and it does so by the following semiconscious calculation: “You might have used this word seriously here, but I know you wouldn’t use it excitedly. And yet you’ve added sparkles anyway, and they’re definitely not a serious thing. So if you’re not sincere, and you’re not truly excited, then it must be ironic excitement.” Like “lol,” sparkles are an anti-seriousness marker, leaving space for the precise nature of the anti-seriousness to be determined by context. The previous meaning and the calculation step are what made sparkle sarcasm, along with “scare quotes” and Ironic Capitals, survive where official proposals failed—they’re ambiguous and context-dependent, like irony itself.
Why the tilde in particular? After all, asterisks are also a crucial part of the ~*~sparkle ecosystem~*~. But the solitary asterisk had long been committed to other meanings, like *bold* and *narrates own actions in the third person*—neither of which are relevant on the irony-to-enthusiasm scale. More intriguingly, the tilde might have been helped by its visual resemblance to a particular type of sarcastic inflection. The posters on the 2010 LiveJournal thread consistently describe it as “a sarcastic sing-songy voice.” I share this intuition, but “sing-song” is not exactly the terminology of proper linguistics. So I tried to pin it down more specifically, and nearly fell off my chair in excitement when it dawned on me: when you say a word like “sooooo” with a sing-song sarcastic inflection, the pitch of your voice literally rises, then falls, then rises slightly again. In other words, your intonation makes the shape of a tilde.
The full-fledged state of sparkle sarcasm was described by a BuzzFeed reporter in 2015 as “somewhere between sarcasm and a sort of mild and self-deprecatory embarrassment over the usage of a word or phrase.” In theory, sparkle sarcasm has as many possible typographical variations as sparkle enthusiasm. But in practice, it tends to veer more towards the subdued side: a pair of ~tildes~, perhaps up to a sparkle emoji or ~*asterisk plus tilde*~, but often simply an initial ~tilde. There may not be quite as much space for ~*~*true sparkle exuberance*~*~ in deadpan snark.
A still more deadpan kind of irony is created in the lack of punctuation and capitalization altogether, what I call minimalist typography. How do you search for this sort of thing, the inverse of all caps and multiple exclamation marks? All caps or block capitals is lucky to have a few established names, and has had decades to attract interest from internet advice manuals. For minimalist typography, this is not yet the case. There’s no entry for it in Urban Dictionary or the Jargon File, and it’s the only one I’ve needed to propose a name for. So instead, I turned to two sources: people complaining and people analyzing. Let’s start with the complaints, to establish a timeline.
As we saw above, computers based on teletype machines in the 1960s and 70s supported only uppercase letters. But a little later, in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the popular computer operating system Unix was case-sensitive—very sensitive. If your username was “foobar,” and you tried to log in as “FooBar,” then you might as well be a different person. If the way to open up the internet browser was to type “netscape” and you told the computer “Netscape,” then you might as well have typed in “firefox” or “chrome” (neither of which existed yet). All of these case-sensitive Unix usernames and commands were in lowercase, so Unix users got in the habit of keeping such technical vocabulary in lowercase, even at the beginning of a sentence. After all, if you type “foobar should’ve used netscape” even in social messages, then the newbie reading your post is far less likely to get confused and type the wrong capitalization into the terminal.
At the same time as computer users influenced by teletype machines and Apple IIs continued typing in all caps for a while after other users had decided that caps meant shouting, Unix hackers became known for the inverse—the type of people who would type in all lowercase all the time. (As well as the type who would explain with great earnestness that a hacker is just a person who likes figuring things out about computers, and the Hollywood cybervillains are actually crackers.) For the general, non-Unix-coding population, minimalist typography also gradually became something associated with technology: email addresses and urls were generally all lowercase, and usernames often followed this trend as well.
But in the opinions of a whole decade of people posting on internet forums, the greatest cybervillains may well have been the people committing crimes against standard capitalization. From “Netiquette” guides in the 1990s to forum posts into the mid-2000s, a hot topic for griping was other internet users who typed in all lowercase. Both those who liked it and those who didn’t spoke about it in terms of ease of use: “lazy” or “constantly hitting shift puts a lot of strain on the ol’ hands.” The complaints themselves don’t matter: disdain for a bit of language is no more relevant to linguistics than a personal distaste for broccoli is relevant to food science. Rather, like how a food historian might use a historical figure’s diatribe against broccoli to establish that broccoli was indeed being eaten in a particular place at a particular time, the linguistic forms that peop
le complain about can tell us which linguistic forms were becoming popular when. No one bothers with tirades against vegetables they’ve never heard of or words they’ve never encountered.
What’s curious here is that after 2006, there was a marked decrease in people complaining about when people don’t capitalize. Okay, we might think, maybe they just got used to lowercasing, the way that people have chilled out about emoticons or internet acronyms since they first became popular. But then, a few years later, a new under-capitalizing supervillain began ravaging cyberspace. This time, the people complaining weren’t forum posters. They were publications that cater to young people, like Teen Vogue, BuzzFeed, and the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper. And the crime associated with lowercasing wasn’t laziness but passive aggression. Trend pieces about passive-aggressive texting started around 2013 and really got going in 2015 and 2016. These pieces pointed out that this same minimalist typography was liable to make your friends wonder why you’re mad at them. Typing in lowercase was no longer an issue of laziness or efficiency: it became a way of indicating attitude.
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