“The top is mine”, “Only add with scrap”, “Do you want it?” These expressions may sound strange nowadays, but they made a lot of sense to Internet users in the 2000s. The era was marked by online chat rooms, social networks like Orkut and messengers like MSN, and it brought its own language to the web. With many abbreviations and slang terms, the vocabulary is almost incomprehensible to those who have not lived through this period. Check out the following list to learn or recall the meaning of popular terms on the Internet during the 2000s.
READ: Generation 2000: see everything you did on Orkut
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Equivalent to the «top» of the 2000s, the initials «TDB» mean «all the best». The expression was used in forums, MSN conversations and Orkut communities to praise someone or describe any situation they experienced. It was common, for example, to say “the ballad was TDB” or “So-and-so is TDB”.
Asking if someone wants to «tc» means inviting that person to «chat», that is, to chat online. The phrase, which became popular in Internet chat rooms, was often used as a sign of online flirtation.
“I just add it with scrap” – this slang sounds very familiar to anyone who was part of Orkut. In the late social network, it was common for some users to include this message in the «who am I» section of the profile. The warning meant that a friend request was not enough to let a person join the network; it was necessary to send a scrap (or message) on the wall.
The Orkut scraps page – Photo: Reproduction / dnetc
Very common in the vocabulary of Internet users in the 2000s, this slang is the abbreviation of “for hell”. The spelling of the expression varied between “pacas” and “pakas”, but in both cases it was used as a synonym for a lot, a lot, too much, etc.
It sounds strange, but that was the way many Internet users wrote the word «bye» a few years ago on the Internet. Today, saying goodbye to someone like that is considered tacky and completely outdated.
Anyone who talked a lot on MSN certainly recognizes this set of words. «Nick» refers to the user’s name in the messenger, while «subnick» is the phrase that was just below the name. The space was used to express feelings, share lyrics and even send hints.
MSN was popular in 2000 – Photo: Disclosure / MSN
Widely used to say goodbye in MSN conversations or in chat rooms, the expression means «kisses and hugs». Internet users also wrote “xxx” (just kisses) and “xoxoxoxoxo”, to indicate many kisses and hugs.
Noob is slang that means «newbie». Popular in online gaming communities to refer to inexperienced players, the term was widely used by teenagers with a pejorative sense, in the 2000s. The expression became synonymous with someone stupid, loser, stupid.
In the early years of Twitter, the capacity of the servers was not so high, which caused the social network to go down when many people tried to access it at the same time. In these cases, the microblog error page displayed a whale being carried by birds. The scene, which is no longer repeated today, gave rise to the term whale (a kind of synonym for «not working»).
Whale carried by birds appeared when Twitter was overloaded – Photo: Reproduction / Twitter
When someone deactivated a profile on Orkut, they inserted the acronym «DSTV» before the username. The intention was to indicate to other contacts that that account was not available at the moment. Accounts preferred to deactivate the profile rather than leaving the social network instead so that, in the future, they could return to Orkut.
Self-explanatory, this term was used a lot in social networks a few years ago to ask questions about any and all kinds of subjects.
«The top is mine» was an expression used by Orkut users who vied for the first place in the testimonials, the profile area reserved for tributes to the owner of the page. The idea is that the contact at the top of the list would be the most dear and dedicated friend. However, the competition often became so intense that the texts failed to include praise for the honoree and brought only provocative phrases.
Testimonials page were played on Orkut – Photo: Barbara Mannara / dnetc
If you had a profile on Orkut, you certainly remember the fever that was the creation of the so-called fakes (or fake) profiles on the social network. Behind each fake account, however, was a real person, called “off” (short for offline). The expression “on”, from online, was reserved for the fake version of the user. Play was considered a way of meeting new people without exposing themselves.
