No Dark Sarcasm

Circa 1997

I was a freshman undergraduate. The advent of the Internet and personal computing was upon us. My sister had received her baccalaureate degree the previous spring. When she entered school in the fall of 1993, computers were not something that were required of students attending university. Fast-foward 4 years as I am entering my undergraduate career and not only are computers everywhere, every student is expected to bring one to campus with them. I arrived on campus as a wide-eyed uncynical 18-year old and my computer was outfitted so I could reap all the benefits of a 24-hr high-speed internet connection. At this time most people were only familiar with AOL and the unfortuneness that is dial-up. This was the toddler years of the Internet: MP3s had just started to arrive, google still meant 10^100, and Windows 95 crashed seemingly daily.

Part of the undergraduate experience is keep in touch with (or falling in touch with) friends from high school. Email helped with this as we would all send out mass-emails to proclaim the virtues of our respective schools & to coordinate social events when we were in town. Shortly into that year, AOL released a little piece of software called AIM. Users of AOL always had the ability to message with other users ("Instant Messaging" for those of the less-saavy tech persuasion), but AIM extended this use across the Internet. I quickly downloaded the program and encouraged all my friends to as I expanded my Buddy List. One of the perks/pains of AIM was choosing a suitable screen name. You wanted it to reflect who you were but at the same time have some fun with it. This led to many a sweet-folloy-of-youth as people chose names that sounded good at the time but now scream out "what was I thinking?" Stuff like "spartanstud97."

My two best buddies, we'll call them "Brian" and "John," each downloaded AIM so we could chat and catch-up. Many a deep and philisophical debate happened in these conversations -- such as establishment of the cuteness factor and the vortex. One of the hardest things to understand while communicating strictly through the written word is tone. Even if you are fully following a conversation, one is never entirely sure of how the words are intended. This is especially important in the case of sarcasm. When IMing with someone it can be very difficult to figure out if someone is being sarcastic or not. In a spurt of creative wisdom the three of us decided that to help in our conversations we would use that underutilized punctuation symbol the tilde (~) to represent sarcasm. This was a revelation! Our IM conversations were so much easier to follow and in some sort of little-way we felt like we were setting a precedent.

A couple weeks ago I had an IM conversation with a friend and I brought up this idea of using the tilde to denote sarcasm. It had been years since I had done this, but felt like sharing my wisdom. I figured it was our little thing and thought nothing of it. The other night I came home from work and began this post. unfortunately the site was down for maintenance so I was unable to do my post. In the meantime, I decided to do a little research on our friend the tilde. So I went to the definitive source of everything, Wikipedia and looked up tilde to figure out what it is truly used for. If you read the whole entry you will find the following sentence:

"The tilde is also used in instant messaging and other online chat communities, to indicate sarcasm."

I stopped. WHAT? That was OUR thing. Seriously. I'm not trying to take credit for it, but the three of us figured it out on our own 8 years ago. As far as we're concerned, this is the first recorded instance of the tilde to denote sarcasm. Maybe its a case of Newton and Leibniz discovering the bases of Calculus independently of each other...but now in my eyes I have helped to set an Internet Precedent.