Venturing into the land of social media acronyms
鈥淭l;dr鈥� is the only internet abbreviation I know of that boasts a perfectly used semicolon. Where did the acronym originate?
Staff
A聽few weeks ago, I discovered that there are clues to each day鈥檚 New York Times crossword puzzle in the newspaper鈥檚 Wordplay column. Reading this column has not only helped me solve lots more puzzles, but also introduced me to some unfamiliar social media acronyms and slang.
In her , Deb Amlen hides the puzzle鈥檚 theme behind a link: 鈥淭l;dr (Spoiler!).鈥� I had to find out more about this one. It is the only internet abbreviation I know of that boasts a perfectly used semicolon, although it seems that few people use the semicolon any longer. Tl;dr stands for 鈥渢oo long; didn鈥檛 read鈥� and it seems to have begun in the early 2000s. It is hard to read large chunks of text online, so someone who posts, say, a 10-paragraph essay on her theories about 鈥淪tar Trek鈥� might receive a disgruntled tl;dr (or tldr) in response. Or she might realize she had gone on too long and acknowledge the fact by typing tldr at the end. 聽
Tldr can also be understood as the main point of a long piece 鈥� what you might call a summary. The acronym flags the takeaway, so that someone pressed for time can easily decide if the whole thing seems worth reading. This abbreviation is common enough to be defined in Merriam-Webster, but is still probably not appropriate for all contexts. Tech writer Andrew Heinzman gives a helpful rule: 鈥淒on鈥檛 throw around tldr anywhere you wouldn鈥檛 say lol.鈥澛�
Working on a puzzle from the archives (Dec. 8, 2017), I came across this clue: 鈥淪ocial media post that refers to another user without directly mentioning that person.鈥� The answer turned out to be 鈥渟ubtweet.鈥� To understand this one, I had to get more familiar with Twitter, which I usually avoid because my preferred speed of non-face-to-face communication is still U.S. mail.
Bear with me if you already know all this. If you tweet and include a person鈥檚 handle (@username), he or she will be notified of your post. If you don鈥檛, the person won鈥檛 get a notification, although he or she might still run across the tweet.聽
Subtweets are the social media version of talking behind someone鈥檚 back. The word has now found currency outside the digital realm, though, and can be applied to any piece of oblique criticism. A recent example: A classmate of my daughter鈥檚, let鈥檚 call her Jane, wore her pajamas during their online physics class. The next day, the dean called a Zoom meeting and declared that it was unacceptable to wear pajamas during school, even while quarantined. The dean鈥檚 message was a subtweet, according to my daughter, because it publicly rebuked Jane without actually mentioning her by name.聽
More TILs (today I learned) to come in the next column.