This past weekend served to remind me why I like hanging out with the members of The TTT: laughing almost nonstop for seven or eight hours straight, incredible absurd inside jokes, and the ideas that get kicked around which I never would have thought of on my own. Case in point: I was driving with Graham when we got into a discussion, as we are wont to do, regarding teh interwebz.

Now that particular phrase is deceptively straightforward in that when you’re reading “teh interwebz” on teh interwebz, your brain sees the words and gets the joke, and you move on and it’s no big deal. But when you’re discussing teh interwebz in real life, the written language which is so chuckle-worthy suddenly evaporates, leaving you floundering amidst a sea of “uh”s.

“Until this past weekend, I had never been in a situation where I needed to say ‘teh’ aloud.”

Until this past weekend, I had never been in a situation where I needed to say “teh” aloud. When the situation suddenly arose, I was flummoxed. Do you pronounce it “the” because that’s the word it’s representing—after all, the misspelling is a typing mistake, not based on some foreign accent or the like—or do you pronounce it the way it looks, this typographical error having been retranslated from the written form which gave it birth?

Graham informed me that he had previously heard it pronounced basically the way it looks: teh. And on additional consideration, this seems to make sense. If nothing else, it forced us to confront what exactly is going on here. What does “teh” mean in light of the fact that a verbal distinction needs to be made? Why can’t you just say “the interwebz” and get your point across?

The problem is that “the interwebz” sounds basically like “the interwebs”, and aside from the phraseology, there’s no indication that it means anything other than the internet. But “teh interwebz” are different. It seems to be a slang term for the lower class internet consisting of terrible MySpace pages and Live Journals, lofty levels of drama, lurkers, trolls, flamers, 34 year old men acting like 14 year old girls, and sixteen year old boys acting like 27 year old Manga characters. It’s Rule 34. It is often suffixed with -chan.

To say that something is on teh interwebz is to acknowledge that it exists in conjunction with all these other things. In other words, the early nineties promised us an “information superhighway” which looked like a veritable utopia of free discourse and enlightenment and entertainment and culture for all. We did get these things—along with the rest of teh interwebz. On the one hand, it’s almost a term of endearment because, after all, the internet is what it is. On the other, more serious hand, it is an ironic counterpoint to some important thing you’re trying to discuss. To wit:

Guy #1: “Did you hear about the old lady in a wheelchair that got tasered to death?”

Guy #2: “Yeah. I saw it on teh interwebz.”

When you try and break this simple two line exchange down into something meaningful, it’s actually very difficult to do. First we have the old lady getting tasered, which is a really terrible event. Even if she was being belligerent toward the police, that was certainly a lack of discretion on their part. It’s a travesty.

But then Guy #2 says he saw it on teh interwebz. This carries the connotation that the sort of people who are really watching this video are not lawyers and humans rights activists looking to curb police brutality, but teenagers who laugh. That’s the sort of culture it implies. There is an acknowledgment of the terribleness of the event, subverted by the immediate recognition that the vast majority of the people are just getting a kick out of it. (Not to mention the whole “don’t want to watch but you can’t look away” cliché of human psychology.) It harkens back to multiple levels of sarcasm.

But what happens when you strip away the “interwebz” part? A fascinating language development reveals itself: the sarcasm remains.

It works just as well if you talk about, for example, “teh peoples”. In addition to the pidgin (Lolcat-esque) plural on the word people, the “teh” endows the concept with a measure of irony and sarcasm. If we were talking about the voting public needing to make an informed decision in the next Presidential election, but realizing that the vast majority of people do no research at all besides what they might happen to catch on the mainstream news networks, we could say, “the fate of America lies in the hands of teh peoples”—meaning we’re all screwed. “The people” are well educated, informed, and enjoy stimulating intellectual debate. “Teh people” drink beer in front of the TV while complaining about high gas prices and low bank account balances.

The word “Teh”, then, has become the ironic version of “the”. It is demeaning, sarcastic, and reverses the connotations of the word to which it’s attached. It works with just about anything you care to mention: Teh President, teh police, teh French, or Teh Windows Vista. We can talk ironically about teh weather—meaning that the person talking thinks discussing the weather is generally a pointless waste of time if it doesn’t directly interfere with plans. And if we’re not interested in attending a particular event, we could talk about teh plans, teh event, or teh concert—annoyed that we need to participate at all, no matter what level of awesomeness was promised.

I’m but a simple armchair linguist, but I can’t help but wonder if this is a new, novel development in the progression of English. A while back I mentioned briefly how the downfall of English might be that it would become the language of sarcasm—and it would cease to be useful because no one would be able to recognize ironic context. Maybe this is yet another step towards that.

Certainly there are people who disagree that “teh” is always ironic and would say it is merely playful. It hasn’t gained widespread acceptance by any means, staying within a geeky niche culture. And these niches have a tendency to die out after their time has passed. How many people say “groovy” in a non-ironic context? The difference with “teh” being, I think, that it was born ironic, at least insomuch as it was a reaction against the first fast and sloppy typers.

Regardless, “teh” is something of a sarcasm punctuation mark. Rather than a nonalphanumeric, we now have a word for it—a bastardization of “the” which lends itself quite naturally to derision. It could be the future.

Or then again, it could be teh future.

-Ted