May the Fourth Be With You

[conuly]

Poll #19901

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 131

View Respondents

What does the "h" stand for in "imho"?

View Answers

Honest - the whole thing is "in my honest opinion"
13 (9.9%)

Humble - the whole thing is "in my humble opinion"
113 (86.3%)

I have never been sure what this meant
2 (1.5%)

I am not familiar with this at all
1 (0.8%)

Other
2 (1.5%)

When you see "imho", do you treat it as

View Answers

An initialism - I read each letter individually, as in PTA
34 (26.0%)

An acronym - I read it as a word, as in NASA
30 (22.9%)

Neither - I translate each letter into its component word
63 (48.1%)

I'm not familiar with this
0 (0.0%)

I don't know what I do
2 (1.5%)

Other
2 (1.5%)

Are you more likely to type "imho" or "imo"?

View Answers

"imho"
44 (33.6%)

"imo"
34 (26.0%)

They're interchangeable
10 (7.6%)

Neither, I never preface an opinion with a disclaimer
16 (12.2%)

Neither, I always type it out in full
10 (7.6%)

Other
17 (13.0%)

~~~~~~~

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Comments

[nostalgia]

To me the "humble" actually translates as "not at all humble, verging into arrogant" so I never use it myself.

[sabotabby]

That's how I read it too. I use it if I'm being arrogant or sarcastic. Otherwise, IMO.

[cactuswatcher]

Me, too. I have used IMHO in the past to mark what I was aware was just an opinion because that's what others were doing, but didn't feel good about it. Most are aware we're all operating on our own opinions. So why even bother with IMO? The words "I think" mostly covers it, so that's what I use.

[stardreamer]

A lot of these acronyms are holdovers from the days of fanzines and Usenet, and were primarily used as keystroke-savers. "IMO" is marginally quicker to type than "I think". It gets more obvious with things that stand for whole phrases like AFAIK ("as far as I know").

[archangelbeth]

And IIRC -- If I Recall Correctly.

[conuly]

What does it stand for if you don't recall correctly?

[archangelbeth]

IFirc. With, you see, a Big If. O;>

[asakiyume]

Yeah! Like if you're humble, you don't need to *say* so. (... and yet I use it. Eeep!)

[spikethemuffin]

I don't know, though... I think of it as acknowledging that maybe people don't necessarily automatically want your opinion? So the "h" stands for "hey, not a white cismale dude.." (Sorry.)(Ish.)

[asakiyume]

The h is a flexible, accommodating member of the acronym!

[cellio]

I have sometimes seen IMNSHO from self-aware people who are willing to admit it.

And the existence of this variant is why it cannot stand for "honest".

[steorra]

My first significant experience with internet socialness was the Conlang email list. A side effect of that was that most of the abbreviations I learnt were knowledge/opinion qualifiers like IMHO, IMNSHO, IIRC, ISTM, etc. I never got into the habit of using them myself, though. (And I wouldn't generally use the expression "in my humble opinion", but if I did, I'd type it out in full rather than using an initialism.)

[steorra]

And speaking of misidentifying acronyms, it took a while for me to figure out what "ISTM" meant. For a while I kept wanting to read it as "I seem to mean", but that never quite made sense in context. Eventually I figured out that it was "It seems to me".

[moxie_man]

It's a Maine-thing to read acronyms as words.

"The 'ups' driver didn't read the note on my door, left my package on the doorstep, and it got wet!"

[batwrangler]

Elaborations:

Generally sarcasm.

It depends on context.

If I'm reading to myself, I think I generally sort of gloss it as unimportant filler. If I'm reading aloud, it would depend on context whether I spelled it out or transposed the full phrase for it.

I occasionally use it, but my usage is extremely limited and generally for humorous effect?

[asakiyume]

exactly! yeah, sarcasm or humor or self deprecation ("here I am sounding off again")

[larryhammer]

That

[julian]

Basically, Batwrangler speaks for me in this.

[zesty_pinto]

You missed one of the most popular choices of all!

[conuly]

A horse is a horse of course, of course, and he doesn't get an opinion.

[asakiyume]

When I use it, I sometimes do it like this IM(not so)HO or make some other deprecating remark, because really it's kind of the opposite of humble to say IMHO? ... And yet I don't type IMO. Weird.

[conuly]

Well, there's always IMNSHO.

IMNSHO

[asakiyume]

I may have to try popularizing that....

[stardreamer]

"From the way chatroom moderators respond to threats of violence against women, to the reluctance among authorities to name this as a terrorist threat, I am filled with this unsettling sense that because incels mainly want to kill, maim or assault women, they are simply not taken as seriously as if they wanted to kill pretty much anyone else. Doesn’t everyone want to kill women, sometimes, is the implication? Or at least give them a fright?"

THIS. There's tremendous resistance to even labeling the selective killing of women as a hate crime; for example, I don't think any mainstream media outlet has ever used that term about the Ecole Polytechnique murders. If he'd gone after blacks or gays or Muslims, nobody would hesitate -- but women? They don't count as people.

[conuly]

Agreed.

[wpadmirer]

I loved the erotica vs. fanfiction.

[conuly]

♥

[spikethemuffin]

Seconded.

[dawnebeth]

That little poll was interesting. I have dyslexia and often "see" a word I don't know how to pronounce simply as all the letters together--my brain doesn't say it as I'm reading at all. I "hear" all the other words in my head as I read, except those I don't recognize. I started this in my teens and twenties when I began reading fantasy and sci fi novels which frequently have lots of Gaelic names and words. So, imho is just four letters without a sound to me.

[flexagon]

IMHO has been fully replaced by TBH in my lexicon.

[conuly]

What if you're not being honest, though?

[asakiyume]

That's when you use TBOPH (to be only partially honest) or TDABH (to dissimulate a bit here)

[greghousesgf]

I write erotic fanfic that has nothing to do with angels or hermaphroditic aliens and the one time I put robots in there it was a joke, am I doing it wrong?

[conuly]

Do you like the results?

[greghousesgf]

yes

[archangelbeth]

Am I more likely to type...
Other: IMAO. In My Arrogant Opinion. O;D

[conuly]

LOL

[archangelbeth]

*checks her fanfic on AO3*

Yup, I've moved the angel/demon fic over more than anything else I smutted. *wry*

[conuly]

Smuuuuuuuuut.

[archangelbeth]

PR0N and SMUT, YAAAAAS!

That said, I'm completely the opposite about which words tend to jolt me out of reading, and therefore I will bloody well conlang some naughty anatomy words if I possibly can.

(And then there's the time that the first-person narrator had a filthy mouth and I was writing it and making D: and O_O faces the whole time.)

[lusentoj]

Ahh... On the foreign language one, a lot of these are the same in various other languages I know a bit of. "Cowboy pants" is the same in Faroese, "foot fingers" are also in Japanese, of course German/Swedish/Icelandic/Dutch are all extremely similar if not the same... We've sadly lost most of this kind of thing in English due to borrowing words (and not knowing what the ones we use "really" mean now), a point I like to bring up because it actually makes English natives worse at learning foreign languages.