We Should See Other Blogs

In the beginning there was Eternal September, when n00bs flooded the internet (back in 1993, if you can remember that far back). They brought with themselves something the mostly academic and lucid member of the internet had not then seen: Exclamation points. In fact, the n00bs brought them by the truckload.

You could tell who was and was not a n00b by the number of points they used. Chances were someone was fresh meat if someone made a sentence like this!!!!!!!!!!!

This absurd level of excitement led to many a user accidentally letting go of the shift key while expressing themselves. So you would see sentences like this!!!!!!!!!!!!111

Eventually this became its own meme, usually highly sarcastic, and often used to mock those internet denizens whose excitement had grown too unwieldy.

And as with most memes, !!!!!11111one eventually took on a life of its own. Variants began to pop up. After all, it can be hard to tell if a luser is !!!!!11111ing on purpose as a cunning riposte, or if they are indeed massive idiot.

So net-savvy n00b-mockers began adding a “one” to the end of their exclamatory mockery, bringing the absurdity level of the meme to almost Monty-Python-ish levels.

Still more variants exist on the internet, include my all-time favourite. It’s a snowclone of !!!!!1111one, transposed to question marks, so it looks like this?????111 This question mark snowclone transposes the meme (in a similar if somewhat more clever form to adding a “one”) from the original “mistake” to a highly non-ambiguous form of mockery.