One of my favourite ever jokes was told to me by a German friend.
"How many Germans does it take a change a lightbulb?
One. We are very efficient"
His fairly strong accent, perpetually furrowed brow and deadpan delivery really made it
lol is a depiction of someone drowning with their arms up and I won’t heat otherwise.
Steve Holt
\o/
Or its The value of o
The absolute value?
Shame, you should get your hypothalamus checked.
German humour is no laughing matter.
WE DO NOT SMILE IN GERMANY
eh… just find a German who’s old enough, and tell them: 7-1.
Eins und zwei und drei und… '54, '74, '90, 2014 ja da stimmen wir alle ein!!!
It was glorious. Free shots in the German bar during the end of the game
Yeah – even as someone who doesn’t watch football that made me grin.
My parents lived in Germany for a while. One day, my dad dropped the car off at the mechanic, who spoke far better English than my dad did German. A couple days after that, there was a big football match between England and Germany, which I assume England won, because when my Dad went to pick up the car, that same mechanic pretended he couldn’t speak English.
Honestly, we should be adapting more non English letters into our emoticons. Ü and ö are great examples, but :þ or :Þ looks way more like a tongue sticking out than :p does (though, I said non English, and þorn is, technically, an English letter…
Ÿ could be something… I’m not sure what, but something. Potentially pornographic…
ẞ or ß could be some kind of sideways boobs… Maybe an ass?
ð could be eyes if doubled ð.ð sunglasses:
ð-ðÐ could be gap-toothed smiley. =Ð nerd smiley: 8Ð
There are others, but I only have English, Esperanto, and Icelandic installed right now.
Esperanto has letters with little hats. Ĵ makes a nice little umbrella.
Ÿ sparkling wine - let’s celebrate
Ÿ leaning on my hands, listening intently
You mean like Lenny Faces?
͡ ° ͜ʖ ͡ – ✧
Gboard actually has them built in ᕙ(＠°▽°＠)ᕗ
ಠ╭╮ಠ
I’ve had Gboard since like android 6!? I had no idea these were even here!!! Wow!
The real answer is that using a non-standardized Strichgesicht is against the rules.
Punkt Komm Strich
DIN 5008
Ö
yiiiiiip yip yip yip yip uh-huh uh-huh
Brrrrrrriiiiinngg! Yip yip yip yip uh huh. Telephone. Yip yip yip yip yip.
Ö
Look book, look book
sound of da police
Ü
That’s the sound I make when someone said something extremely possessed or stole my sandwich
What the fuck is extremely possessed
You know, when people are in one of their funny moods… From normal echolalia to deranged RL shitposting ;)
in all seriousness, it’s likely because the origin of the emoticon is tied in with the ASCII character set, and the codes available when the emoticon was conceived. emoticons were around for decades, before we started using them on phones.
in fact, “smilies” are indeed not German!!!
Eh, I feel like we would’ve adopted our own style by now. For example, this face ^^ was fairly popular in the German internet before mobile phones and emojis took over, because it’s just two key presses on the German keyboard.
I think, the main problem is simply that umlauts look like letters to us. If someone types a random Ü or Ö after their sentence, you might think they meant to write another sentence. Or you simply do not register that it’s supposed to resemble a face, because it’s just a letter in your mind. Much like you presumably don’t either look at an E and think that it looks like a rake, because the association with the letter is much stronger.
but i am not talking about emojis… i am talking about emoticons, which came into heavy use in the early 80’s.
in any case, i was trying to be “cute” or cheeky when i suggested that “smilies” didn’t exist in Germany, but i failed to communicate that effectively. perhaps i should’ve used a winky face, or provided a little more context about the origins. sorry about my perceived snarkiness; wasn’t my intent.
EDIT : i am actually struggling to find a reference to “^^” being used by anyone; could you point me to a source, as i am genuinely curious about this
Uh, sure, ^^ has been so popular that even some renowned German news webpages have articles on it:
- https://www.heise.de/tipps-tricks/Was-bedeutet-6268625.html
- https://praxistipps.chip.de/das-bedeutet-dieser-smiley_92160
- https://www.giga.de/extra/netzkultur/specials/was-bedeuten-die-zeichen-im-chat-doppeldach/
Wikipedia also mentions it:
Im Internet werden zwei Zirkumflexe (^^) verwendet, um Freude oder Belustigung über die vorhergehende Aussage auszudrücken. Die beiden Symbole sollen vor Kichern zwinkernde Augen darstellen. Man findet es in Chatgroups, Foren, MMORPGs und dergleichen
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumflex#Verwendung
I guess, here’s some less good English sources, too:
- https://www.quora.com/What-does-mean-in-texting-1
- https://www.askingbox.com/question/what-is-the-meaning-of-superscript-corners-as-smiley
And I’d wager more than 90% of the folks on feddit.org have used ^^ before, if you want to ask real people about it.
SMH she’s never been on feddit.org/c/ich_iel.
I suggest the above format over links.
Why is it preferable?
Clickability.
Weird, the one I typed is clickable, too. Is that just a quirk of the standard web interface that my server is using? Though I see that it also changes the link so you’re still using your own instance when you’re visiting the link, which would be enough to make it preferable.
It is, but it opens in a browser instead of the app if using an app(maybe some apps handle it better than others though)
It allows other instances to click your link without leaving their instance.
deleted by creator
yes that is weird. Voyager vs lemmy-web feature set apparently
Formatting it like they did allows people to click through while staying on their home instance.
Germans enjoy humour, but smiling isn’t as efficient as laughing on the inside.
Huh. Using them from now on Ü
That only explains half of the question…
:|
’ ’|:
. .
I CAN’T LITERALLY PICTURE ANY FACES LET ALONE ONES I’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE. ALSO, WHY ARE WE YELLING?!
SOMETIMES YOU GOT A LOT IN YOU AND IT COMES OUT LOUD AND THAT’S COOL BROTHER JUST KEEP CRANKIN THAT HOG AROOOOO
I DONT KNOW, BUT IM GOING TO CONTINUE TO YELL BCZ NOW ITS FUN.
ï
That’s just an upside down dick though
With the power of unicode you can add eyes to any letter:
ẅ s̈ M̈ _̈
=̈ ~̈ ×̈ +̈
I was a new grad student at a gathering organized to introduce us to the department, and I was drinking a hard lemonade. The department head walked up to me and said, with a strong German accent:
In Germany, zat would be illegal.
I thought she was just giving me a hard time about drinking the lemonade rather than a real beer, but then I looked it up and the lemonade would in fact have been illegal in Germany. (Or rather it would have been illegal when she was growing up there. It was legalized since then.)
