February 8, 2015

"Classic typo," I say when Meade points out the now corrected "teh" in the previous post.

'"It's so classic that it's become..." he says, and I finish the sentence "...a meme."

"I bet there's a Wikipedia article on it," I say, and I'm right!
Teh

Not to be confused with The.
For other uses, see Teh (disambiguation).

Teh is an Internet slang neologism most frequently used as an English article, based on a common typographical error of "the". Teh has subsequently developed grammatical usages distinct from the. It is not common in spoken or written English outside technical or leetspeak circles, but when spoken, it is pronounced /tɛ/ or /tə/....

It is often used ironically, and can be used to mock someone's lack of "techie" knowledge or skills, as an insult, or to reinforce a group's elitism; cf. eye dialect. It is frequently used to denote mock ignorance of over-used and over-determined concepts (e.g., "long live teh Patriarchy").
I love that there's a Wikipedia article on typos, but I won't detour there (or into leetspeak). My inclination runs toward eye dialect — "the use of nonstandard spelling for speech to draw attention to an ironically standard pronunciation."
The term was coined by George P. Krapp...
... dangerously subject to the respelling "crap"...
... to refer to the literary technique of using nonstandard spelling that implies a pronunciation of the given word that is actually standard, such as wimmin for women; the spelling indicates that the character's speech overall is dialectal, foreign, or uneducated. This form of nonstandard spelling differs from others in that a difference in spelling does not indicate a difference in pronunciation of a word. That is, it is dialect to the eye rather than to the ear. It suggests that a character "would use a vulgar pronunciation if there were one" and "is at the level of ignorance where one misspells in this fashion, hence mispronounces as well."
Wow. I had never heard of this, though I've seen it, of course, and so have you:
American cartoonist Al Capp frequently combined eye dialect with pronunciation spelling in his comic strip "Li'l Abner". Examples include lissen, aristocratick, mountin [mountain], correkt, feends, hed, introduckshun, leppard, and perhaps the most common, enuff.
AND: Hitting "publish," I say, "There, check out the post. Urine it."

16 comments:

David said...

Al Capp would take a lot of flak if he were working these days. He would be an internet cartoonist, most likely. The papers would fear the PC backlash.

There are many great Capp characters. My favorite remains Stupefyin' Jones. Like Barbie, she might have been impossible in real life, which would make a modern reaction to her all the more delicious.

Michael K said...

Don't be disrespectful toward Thomas Crapper.

They dismiss the story that "crap" is a term based on his name but there is evidence for another source.

Anonymous said...

RE: assfine@4:40

At first glance it looked like Meade was listing off some of the stuff purchased via the amazon Portal again.

MadisonMan said...

I have to think that the Spam posts arrived because of the word urine.

P.s. verification word was erinu...an anagram of urine. Hmmm

traditionalguy said...

Enuff is how I have spelled it so long that the correct spelling looks like a joke. Think of it as folk songs.

traditionalguy said...

Mr Scott alert: Fox News is interviewing Gov. Walker at 8:00 EST tonight. They like him it seems.

mishu said...

Buy teh t-shirt!

MadisonMan said...

There's a wiki entry for Meh too.

Curious George said...

Welcome to 2003. Enjoy your stay.

chillblaine said...

leet(1337)speak

People typing too fast in multiplayer video games chat interface are thought to have started it, along with pwned. Also called lolspeak.

Quaestor said...

What threw me for longer than I care to recall was the emoticon <3. For some reason, perhaps my electives in Egyptology, I failed to correlate <3 with "heart" and the implication of affection, which led in turn to some unexpected and unintentional 'he said, she said" fireworks. <3 approximates the demotic rendering of the syllable la, and is the shorthand for the hieroglyph symbol of a eye in profile. BTW, la was sometimes inserted by scribes just to indicated the direction one should read. La and ka (the hieroglyph in the form of a duck) always point in the logical direction of the script.

chickelit said...

I wonder if the Dutch have this problem too? "Het" is an anagram for both "teh" and "the."

tim in vermont said...

Huckleberry Finn wuz full of eye dialect.

Robert Cook said...

"<3 approximates the demotic rendering of the syllable la, etc., etc."

Wha--?

It's just an approximation of a heart--turned sideways--using available symbols.

Or are you just taking the piss?

Anonymous said...

althouse, I had to cringe when I read this.
"dear look what those zany 'kids' are doing now!"

Quaestor said...

Or are you just taking the piss?

Long, long before l33tspeak, or even emoticons, there was Egyptology. Before MacOS 7 and outline font sets there were typewriters. In the days of typewriters if one wanted to insert a bit of demotic in an English text, as in a term paper on New Kingdom trade relations with Punt and Saba, one used a convention whereby symbols available on the IMB Selectric were concatenated to approximate demotic syllabograms.