Words are cheap online, and sometimes there are simply too many of them. It’s for such circumstances that the five characters “TL;DR” have developed as a staple of online discussions. They stand for the phrase “Too Long; Didn’t Read,” and are traditionally deployed as a response to an excessively long piece of comment or argument in an online debate (or as a humorous way of asking someone to stop waffling and get to the point).
TL;DR is an interesting acronym, not least because it’s one of the very few to contain a semicolon—a hint at its likely origins among the ranks of editors on Wikipedia and members of other less high-minded online forums like FARK, where it first began frequently to be used around 2003.72 One unusual variation on TL;DR is an animated image of a teal deer—sometimes used in online postings due to their similar pronunciation—but the ethos it embodies today is more often expressed both without the “official” semicolon and in deliberate haste.
At the opposite end of the rhetorical scale to TL;DR is a far older acronym devoted to the idea that someone should read the relevant text in depth before joining in a debate—a sentiment more often expressed as “RTFM,” or Read The Fucking Manual. It’s thought to have arisen among technicians in the US Air Force during the 1950s, or perhaps even earlier during the Second World War, but didn’t reach print until the end of the 1970s, when it was used (without being spelled out) as an insiders’ joke on the contents page of a manual for the software library system LINKPACK.73
RTFM remains in widespread use online, together with a more recent coinage also intended to suggest that people should look something up before asking an obvious question: “Google Is Your Friend,” or GIYF for short. This relatively polite phrase also has its less civilized variants, including the pithy JFGI (“Just Fucking Google It”), whose profanity is surely indebted to RTFM and which comes complete with its own website at justfuckinggoogleit.com for those who really don’t understand.
Both saying too much and understanding too little can be fatal flaws online—although it’s worth noting that the culture of sites like Wikipedia has also bred a particular emphasis on establishing efficient protocols for explanation. Hence one of the most pleasing linguistic popularizations of a culture in which almost anything can be looked up by anyone: disambiguation, meaning “the removal of ambiguity.”
Although dating back to the early nineteenth century, the term has come into its own online thanks to the notion of “disambiguation pages,” within which things sharing the same name are differentiated so that those typing them into a search box can find the relevant result. Type “top” into Wikipedia, for example, and the disambiguation process will ask you whether you mean clothing, a DC Comics supervillain, part of a ship’s rigging, an album by the Cure, a short story by Kafka, a sexual role, a US Marine Corps or Army rank, a topological space, the largest semisimple quotient of a module, the greatest element in a partially ordered set, a quark, one of two places in Azerbaijan or a Romanian river, a Unix program, a data type in computer science theory, or a Malaysian/Indonesian Muslim extremist. Or just a spinning toy. Clarity is all.