| Eleventy!!1! |
[Aug. 6th, 2007|03:15 pm] |
I hope you're all familiar with the extremes of self parody inherent in the title to this piece. Assuming you're not for a moment --
Hopelessly enthusiastic people will often end messages with one or more exclamation points. If they're not careful, while pounding out !!!s they may come off the shift key, resulting in things like !!!!1 or more ridiculously !!!!!1!!!11!!!. Use of this by the non-manic, is, of course, ironic parody already. But then someone decided to parody that -- spelling out the 1, to make it clear they were parodying: !!!!one!!! And for situations where three ones occur together (!!!111!!!) one might write !!!eleventy-one!!! as what one would hope would be the final stage of parody.
Over at the Language Log they mention a case where a reporter ended his report with "-- 30 --", evidently old journalist lingo for "this is the end". 30 doesn't make much sense in this context, but we do have linguistic constructs like "86 it" and "10-4" that use numbers for finality, so all that is left is to discover an appropriate etymology for ending with "30"; the first few floated (some sort of union action, etc.) really don't ring true, though the list linked to has some amusing possibilities.
The most satisfying given is that it comes from the practice of ending with "-- XXX --". XXX is a nice termination marker, along with ### and other such things. XXX THE END XXX looks nice and final. -- XXX -- as the last page, instead of a page number like -- 17 -- also makes sense.
From there, the explanation is that XXX was misinterpreted as 30 printed in Roman numerals.
Misinterpreted? Or self parody? OMG!!!CXI!!I! I think we may have found prior art for eleventy.
(PPPPS: please note new, less-confusing 'crazy' icon. It usually means I am being silly.) |
|
|
| Comments: |
Perhaps -30- is easy to do in Morse code or some similar mechanical device.
It was definitely used on the news gathering side and not in the type shop. SHRDLU is the linotypist's thing. | |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}