Comment on The waiting is killing me
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoYeah, I required a lot of context to figure QQ out back in the day, and even then, I didn’t really get why it meant crying. Took me a long time to really wrap my mind around the 2nd gen emoticons and stop trying to figure out the abbreviation, even after I understood the meaning. During that time, I was more likely to use “qq” rather than “QQ”, though even today I still see it as a reference to “QQ”, just lazier typing.
HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I remember ICQ fondly, but I guess I’m too young or didn’t inhabit the same tech niches you do.
To me, ending a typed message with “qq” or “QQ” is for teletype systems that lacked length and special characters, so it helped if you alphanumerically stated that your message was an interrogative, which wound up being “qq,” presumably two for certainty it wasn’t a typo or a word ending in Q.
E.g. “THERE” could mean “I am there” and “THERE QQ” could mean “Are you there?”
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m not sure where it came from but I saw it on IRC, around the same time ICQ, msn, and aim were in their heyday.
And that makes sense, I’ve never used a teletype system and guess that especially the old ones might have had difficulty generating the correct rise in tone to signal a question, especially if it does text to voice on the fly while things are being typed and might already be saying the word that needs to be said differently to imply a question.
HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Teletype, not text-to-speech.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_(disambiguation)
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Oh right, those worked by calling up someone who also had a teletyper who would then handle the speech part of whatever call they were making. I forgot it was a human doing the “translate from typed to spoken and back” and assumed there was a text-to-speech and voice-to-text in the loop.