Don’t Blame the Internet for New Slang

Gretchen's book Because Internet, is fantastic. It was riveting and helped me get over a ton of personal grammatical hang-ups I have. The audiobook is amazing, go borrow it at your library!

>What is the idea or purpose of TL;DR and TL;DW by the way? Both basically mean summary, so it is not that there is a new meaning that we needed to express somehow. It still catched on.

Slang is usually not about new meaning, it's about new 'nuance'.

Either making the same meaning fresher (by using a more modern term, which will get out of fashion after some time), or conveying an added nuance about the same meaning (the same way "Yes, I'd like to" and "fuck yeah!" mean the same thing as answer to the question "Should we go to the beach", but give it difference nuance, e.g. excitement).

Originally, "too long, didn't read" was a comment posted on extremely long blog posts that were tedious to read. It was flippantly dismissive without addressing anything the author had to say. It was a way of saying "get to the point".

That got shortened to "TL;DR"

Then it got adopted by people telling the stories to head off criticism and provide a soundbite version of the story. Basically, here's the whole story if you want, but if you thought it was too long, here's the gist.

I always thought that TL;DR was a flippant statement that the post you have made was too long. This seems to have morphed into 'For those who think that this is too long...' often just the important parts, which is usually a summery. I'm sure someone could make a point about using FAQ, etc

From my memory, "tl;dr" used to be a response to a long post that was supposed to be an insult, like "do you really expect me to read all of that crap?". Then it morphed into it's current usage where people would try to cut off this criticism by adding a short version of a post for people who would consider it too long to read, thus marked as "tl;dr".

That’s the thing about slang, it rarely actually gives you totally new meanings. It usually just gives you less formal and deliberately impenetrable-to-the-outgroup synonyms for existing words.

I expect tl;dr to be shorter then summary which could be 2-3 paragraphs. Plus summary is supposed to be good faith and avoid oversimplification. Tl;dr is two quick sentences that totally oversimplify and cant be really taken seriously.

They are different words. You don't TL;DR a book. You'd do a Summary (or Cliff notes) of it.

I'd also argue it's new and internet based.

Scientist have 'Abstract' because they need it.

The general public simply did not publish pre-internet. Now they do. So needed a new word.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr

a tl:dr should really be no more than 10 words. A summary could be longer.