John: Hello and welcome to this week's Round Table Word of the Week. This week we are looking at some of the most hated online abbreviation on the English internet.
Heyang: 欢迎来到这周的英语词汇小百科。这周我们来个大家介绍一些缩写词。
John: The thing you got to remember to use these phrases and abbreviations selectively. Because you might not always get a very positive reaction. So the first is LOL—perhaps the oldest online abbreviation in the English language. Do you know what it means?
Heyang: Hahaha.
John: It means “laugh out loud” which Heyang just did. But the problem is this specific abbreviation has become part of our lexicon and part of the words we use. Sometimes to everyone's frustration and annoyance, some people instead of laughing, will just say LOL rather than actually laughing.
Heyang: LOL 是大笑的意思。Isn't it really annoying when you are saying it and not texting it.
John: Oh totally. I mean never say LOL, because people will think you are kind of stupid. And then the next one is YOLO.
Heyang: YOLO!

John: It means “you only live once”. I'm not even sure where this came from. But it was an idea that you should go out there and have your adventure. You should live life the fullest and celebrate and so on and so on. But as you have just heard from Heyang and I, it gets old pretty quickly.
Heyang: YOLO 就是你这辈子只活这一次，仅此一生。你要珍惜中的各种机会，好好活这一遭。这类的意思吧。Or why can't you just say it in a more sophisticated way, like “carpe diem.”
John: Yeah. And there is TBH or “to be honest.” Basically, we expect you to be honest all the time, you don't need to tell us that you are being honest.
Heyang: To be honest 就是老实说。But do you actually use it often? Maybe not.
John: No, I definitely don't. But a very similar one is “in my humble opinion” or “in my honest opinion.” So IMHO. The H is redundant, you don't need to use it. The M is redundant. So you can just say IO. But that's just kind of weird.
Heyang: Yeah, it is. I think only the social media native generation probably might use it.
John: And there is JFGI. A little bit difficult to say. But it could be kind of fun to write it down when someone's really annoying you. A lot of this is coming from the idea of a website let me google that for you or LMGTFY.com. So the idea being that someone comes to you and asks a question, it's a question they can answer themselves it they only go and search for the answer. So JFGI is just f***ing google it.
Heyang: Ok. 要是用中文说这个词的话应该就是“百度一下会shi吗？”为什么你自己不能去寻找答案，非要问别人。这也是一种非常犀利地回应的方式。
John: And there is TL;DR. This is one of the more popular abbreviations used online. It stands for “too long; didn't read.” So basically, there's this really long article that everyone's talking about. You just say TL;DR. I didn't read it.
Heyang: I wish there is a Chinese equivalent to this. 意思就是太长了我没读。I think there's so many articles that deserves this kind of treatment.
John: It's really interesting too that blog culture on the American internet at least that re-appropriated this. What they done is instead of saying this is the summary of an article, they say TLDR and they give you the summary of the article. And there's IYKWIM. If you know what I mean.
Heyang: 如果你知道我的意思的话。。。Do people actually use this?
John: I've never seen this before.
Heyang: It's a bit too long.
John: But funny enough, maybe you can guess what it is. The response that is NIDKWYM “no I don't know what you mean.”
Heyang: I think this is like trying hard to decipher a code. It's beyond me.
John: TMI. That's one actually coming into our lexicon. For example, maybe I'm sharing too much information with Heyang about my daily routine. And she says ‘John, TMI.' Too much information.
Heyang: Yeah. 信息量太大，让你脑洞大开。I think this is a useful phrase. I'll use it on you all the time John.
John: Oh gosh. I've created a monster. Next up AFAIR. Or in some cases and I think more usually, AFAIK “as far as I recall” or “as far as I know.”
Heyang: 据我回忆。This is slightly different from IMHO, right?
John: Oh, it's very different but at the same time useless, basically. And if you are going to take the time to write this out, you might as well just write out ‘as far as I know.' And the last but not least, again it's one of the more popular ones. One that's used quite often. You got to be careful sometimes. Sometimes you may come across a link or an article or maybe some pictures that you think is quite interesting. And then you send it to your friend. And your friend opens the email or opens the link at work. Their boss walks by, they see what they're looking at. And maybe they get into trouble. Maybe they get fired. So next time, instead of just sending it to them, you can put in the subject line NSFW. Not safe for work.
Heyang: 就是不适合在工作场合看或读的影像和文字。这也是给收到这个信息的人一个提醒。 I think this is a very considerate thing to do for your friend.
John: And that's all we have for this week's Word of the Week. Use these abbreviations carefully and sparingly, and you will have some pretty good results.