Disclaimer: I would be surprised if this hasn’t been asked and answered before, but believe me, I’ve tried to find the answer and not found it. If it is somewhere obvious, I apologize in advance.
Now my question:
I have noticed people quoting earlier posters in a thread and right below that quote they will type “This.” Example
I previously assumed that this was a message board filter catching something and replacing it, but I could never figure out what the bad word or phrase was. Now I think it’s on purpose and it means something - probably indicating agreement with the quote, but I’m not sure. Can anyone enlighten me as to what it means and why people do it?
It means “I agree with this. This is what I would say, except you already said it.”
Some people do it because they think it’s cute, some people do it in solidarity with the person whom they are quoting. Some people hate it because they think the people who do it are too lazy to come up with their own take on the matter; others like it because it allows people who are being polled to say “I concur, and _________ has summed it up to my satisfaction.”
You know, as much as I absolutely detest the practice of making the obvious joke and the inevitability of somebody doing same, I’ve got to say, the temptation to quote Sigmagirl’s post and respond with “This.” is pretty intense even for me.
I’m still not going to do it, because I’d have to punch myself in the face and that hurts, but I’m feeling more understanding toward the people who do this. Hopefully, one day, those people can feel more understanding toward my obvious-joke-face-punching proclivities, and we can all hold hands 'round the campfire and sing of peace and love.
More precisely, I think, is that the poster making the comment not only agrees with the quote but also thinks it is responsive to a question asked in the thread. That is, it’s short for “You asked why; this is why,” more than simply “I agree.”
One hopes that the subsequent poster will amplify, add clarification, provide example, or otherwise add some additional substance to the thread after signaling his agreement, as I have tried to do here.
“QFT” has a slightly different meaning than “This” – very slight but significant. “This” means “I agree with what I’ve quoted”; “QFT” means “This quoted post has memorably said the truth in a thread that has had a lot of red herrings, prevarications, misrepresentations, and the like.” The first adds one’s subjective agreement; the second claims to be backing a stand for absolute truth.
Picky but real, at least in the minds of those using the two memes.
So I take it that QFT is then “Quoted For Truth” or something like that. Which is much better than what I inferred, “Quite f-ing true”, which I think I got from my younger days when I thought that Q.E.D. stood for “Quite Easily Done”.
Yeah, “Quoted For Truth.” I thought someone had already defined it, or I would’ve.
Don’t feel embarrassed, though. For a long time, I thought that “YMMV” (“Your mileage may vary”, meaning, roughly, “This is my experience/considered view, but yours may well be different.”) stood for “You make me vomit” – and the (particularly snarky) post in which I first encountered it was one that made that reading sensible.
the +n comes from the practice where on some boards if you like a post you can “rate” it by giving it a point ( or taking one away ) and the highest rated posts float to the top (and conversely the lowest tend to flow out of view pretty quick)
