A suggestion for the LitLat team

General
23

/smh means Strike My Head, right? :wink:

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24

Nope, it’s Save My Hide, an alternative to a more graphic NSFW term.

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25


 not a reliable or verifiable source especially as ChatGPT never produces the citation of its output. Also, in my experience, ChatGPT outputs errors and is well documented as simply making things up.

I would argue that forum posts are not online chat. Chat typically is short messages (one or two sentences) where brevity is a necessity so yes there the use of /s would be appropriate. In discourse (linguistic and software) affect (sic) needs to be explicated and not left to a convention used elsewhere.

26

I understand you are responding to a specific prompt given to ChatGPT here, but you do go on to say these other things, rather than acknowledging that maybe the prompt was overly specific.

Many of these conventions arose from forum-adjacent sites, not chat. One example I encountered was from MetaFilter, which for many years encouraged long-form discussion and discouraged one-liner joke response for the sake of getting “internet points”.[1] The convention for establishing sarcasm on MetaFilter was by appending {/} to the sentence. The practice was affectionately referred to as the sarcasm hamburger, based on its appearance, and you would sometimes see people typing out “HAMBURGER” instead of the symbol. While we wouldn’t really call it a forum, more a semi-serious blog comment section, nobody would confuse it with chat.

I do not know precisely where the /s marking came from, as it is so widespread now, but it is safe to say that it arose after communal chat rooms dipped in popularity.[2] I don’t ever recall seeing it on IRC for example.

The problem of sarcasm itself being very difficult to transmit through text alone is of course nothing new (look up Poe’s Law). People have been trying to mark sarcasm in one fashion or another since BBS and Usenet. The conventions for doing so, and the problem of efficiently denoting that in a fashion that sticks out visually and is easy to type as well, is also not a new one. :wink: (⇐ like that.)

Whatever side of the debate you fall on, I don’t think it is will ever be fruitful to try and force people to avoid the human tendency toward efficiency in communications (SMH being an example), nor will we ever convince people to avoid sarcasm. So it seems best to me to learn the conventions that arise and adapt to them.

P.S. if you’re wondering why it looks the way it does, the marking most likely comes from HTML conventions, where for a time, and in some of the geekier communities online, it would not be uncommon to see <rant> blah blah </rant>, or <sarcasm> blah blah </sarcasm>. From this, you can see how it became shorted to /s and from there proliferated widely into the common discourse, where HTML conventions might not be known.

  1. I don’t know if they still do, or if many people use it, so I speak more to the history of the 'net here in that statement. ↩

  2. Discord and Twitch later revived the practice, but /s predates both of those. ↩

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27

You probably wanted to write </sarcasm> or /s. (Forward slash)

28

Yeah, thanks, fixed it. Something about escaping all of the < characters with a backslash made my mind flip. :laughing:

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29

But I agree. Smileys or emojis are safer. Most “tone indicators” aren’t self-explanatory, if the reader even recognizes their presence. (And using /q or other slash-commands in a chat could lead to unexpected results.)

30

Which is exactly what I mentioned in an earlier post here.

The real issue though is not the use of /s but that the post it is within is unacceptable.