Hacker News Reader

Comment by how_to_bake | Hacker News Reader

Hate to be annoying, but I'm a native English speaker and I just skipped over "AFAIUI" because it was too much work to guess what it meant.

"As far as I understand it" ? RIP if you're not a native speaker.

View on HN

RIP if you are a native speaker too.

IRC-speak is its own language :)

A predecessor of pager code.

I think it is a relatively common abbreviation used in informal writing online, similar to "AFAIK" or "AFAICT" (maybe those are not so common?) but admittedly less common than "QED" or "etc." Yes, it means "as far as I understand it."

Anecdotally, I'm a native speaker, have been reading text on BBSes and then the internet for well over 30 years, and have never seen that one. AFAIK has been around for decades.

Like some other commenters, I skipped right over it rather than try to parse it.

I've been online for 20 years, and AFAIK was pretty common, although a few years ago I came across AFAICT which was pretty easy to extrapolate as ending with "can tell". From that I was able to recognize the pattern here and pretty quickly got "understand it" for UI. I think it's pretty neat that we're able to adapt language in this way, though obviously not foolproof or universal.

They are all weasel words and best avoided. It's a way to make a claim that you're not sure of, with an out if you're wrong.

"AFAIUI" is nowhere even close to as common as your other examples. I have never encountered it before, and Google Trends doesn't even register it in a comparison between the others.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...

Trends isn't the best for this as it's search results not occurrences so really all this will show is the number of people confused by the term for weird contractions like this. "AFAIUI" could theoretically just be completely understood by the community using it.

Number of search results:

AFAIK: 8,600,000 AFAICT: 346,000 AFAIUI: 14,600

Should have made it more clear that I meant that in the general case not in this particular. I've never seen AFAIUI.

Oh, I understood what you meant, I was just providing an additional data point for this particular conversation in response to what you were saying re: search queries vs. results.

Haha yeah I actually chucked at that one. Amazes me how many acronyms people come up with for that simple kind of statement.

I think it actually points to a hole in English - the lack of a short word that expresses a bit of uncertainty regarding one's own statement.

Anyone want to coin a word (or point one out that we're all apparently unfamiliar with)?

AFAIUI seems to solve the problem nicely. Not a native speaker and yet I understood it right away.

TTBOMK, TANST.

Maybe

Covfefe

Yes sir, dispatching the operative now.

Agreed, so sick of these internet acronyms. This isn't text messaging, it's an intelligent discussion forum. Type out what you're saying.

Ain't like we're limited to 140 characters...

Ymmv

Reply on news.ycombinator.com