More on teh

I’m still intrigued by the internet slang word teh. Not being a gamer, it’s hard to see how it’s used more generally, but in the places I go, it’s turning from a typo via a joke into quite a useful word.

Wikipedia’s entry is not a great description, but shows some of the history. In terms of meaning, I think it’s an interesting intensifier, something like ‘the absolute’ or ‘the most’, but implying a sort of (sorry for being a poncey philosopher) Platonic form of the modified word, unifying the example with the concept itself.

For example, a MetaFilter post was deleted for being content-free and stroppy, and the moderator posted:

This post was deleted for the following reason: inflammatory one-link post to a house.gov page w/ extra handwaving = teh lame

See? Teh lame = the quintessence of lameness. Interesting, I thought.

(this post is teh sad).