• cm0002@lemmy.world
    13·
    2 months ago

    I read it as “I’m at a loss for words.” right off the bat before I even realized what it was.

    Clearly I have ascended to a higher plane of meme-istance

  • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
    8·
    2 months ago

    Technically kanji refers to the Japanese writing system, loss is a logogram, English already has them (see $ and @)

    • Sas [she/her]@beehaw.org
      4·
      2 months ago

      If you’re trying for kanji like depictions then the first one but you have to work on your strokes. The box should be a single stroke for the top and the right line. But you gave me an idea for an art thingy in gonna create and hang in my apartment

    • Zoop@beehaw.org
      7·
      2 months ago

      That’s exactly what I was just thinking! Lemmy’s formatting doesn’t work the same way, so it doesn’t work correctly here. I think this is the best I can get it, lol.

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        • Zoop@beehaw.org
          1·
          2 months ago

          The only reason I know/knew is because I googled it way back when, ha!

          IIRC, it had something to do with how the software formatted comments. If you just used regular spaces to try and line the triangles up, it wouldn’t work, because the formatting would ignore any spaces at the beginning of the comment. So you had to use a different kind of invisible character, one it wouldn’t ignore and get rid of, by using an alt key + number code that’s slipping my mind because I’m not in front of a keyboard to use the ol’ muscle memory.
          (Although I rarely ever actually posted or commented. I took ‘lurk moar’ very seriously.)

          A lot like how on here or Reddit when people try to do the shruggy guy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but because of the way the formatting works they get ¯_(ツ)_/¯ since they don’t know enough to figure out how to make it display the way they want

          … I’m sleep deprived, can you tell? Lmao

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        It’s a reference to an entry in the webcomic series Ctrl+Alt+Del. The female lead has suffered a miscarriage, and this particular entry in the comic, titled Loss, depicts her boyfriend’s journey through the hospital, entering the front door alone, talking to the receptionist, talking to the doctor, then standing at her bedside.

        Ctrl+Alt+Del competes (competed?) with Penny Arcade, it’s normally a lighthearted junk food entertainment kind of webcomic aimed at a gamer audience, that SUDDENLY slammed into very heavy material, and then SUDDENLY slammed back out of it. The comic became very widely mocked for the tone whiplash, and one notable form of mockery was making increasingly minimalistic representations of it, often with a “you just lost the game” kind of intention, ie how minimalistic can you go while still reminding others of the comic. A common depiction might be I Ii II I_ (one man standing, a man standing and a woman sitting, so she’s shorter, two men standing at equal height, and then a man standing and a woman lying down) but now :.|:; is even more condensed while maintaining the four panel arrangement.

        This is a meme from 2008; it’s been going around awhile. So to those who have been long familiar with the meme that graphic kind of works like a hieroglyph or kanji character; it’s a very simplified depiction of something that carries a sound/concept. You kind of read it as the word “Loss.”

        • errer@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          Great explanation! Crazy how much depth of knowledge one needs to understand some memes nowadays…

  • Dojan@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 months ago

    Well, no. It wouldn’t be the first kanji of English. Kanji is the Japanese pronunciation of 漢字 (hanzi), where 漢 means han/China and 字 means character/letter. Ergo, it makes no sense to call it “the English language’s first and only Chinese character.”

    If you need to use a Japanese word to describe this, then 絵文字 (e mo ji; picture, character/symbol) fits better, but we already have several words for that, like pictogram or pictograph. One could argue that smileys fall into this category as well. So perhaps it’s a smiley.

      • nightofmichelinstars@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        2 months ago

        Learning random cool stuff like this is part of why I like lemmy, and why I used to like reddit. Please don’t shut down constructive contributions with low effort snark. And before you use your line on me, if I were fun at parties, I would get off lemmy and go to parties.

        • lugal@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 months ago

          There is a difference between “btw etymological this used to mean that but since X we use it in other contexts as well” and “no, you are wrong”. The difference is one is fun at parties, the other is not.