/s = Serious
/srs = Sarcastic
/lh = Left hand
/rh = Right hand
/hh = greg
/x = Xylophone
/pos = Piece of shit
/neg = Never gonna
/newt = 
/hj = you’ve seen tone indicators, right? you know, that thing where there’s a slash then a one-to-three letter abbreviation at the end of a sentence that’s supposed to help you interpret what it means. the most popular ones are /j for “joking” and /s for “sarcasm”. they’re used for information that normally would be indicated using intonation, but can be hard to get across through text alone. tone indicators have been around for decades, but they’ve really exploded in popularity over the past few years. today, there are dozens of tone indicators, often compiled in these well-intentioned lists that get passed around online periodically. people make fun of these extensive lists a lot for including various things that are almost never used in practice, and that’s not what I’m interested in doing here. tone indicators are, nominally, an accessibility tool, and while their implementation is somewhat misguided, they are theoretically useful, for the most part. like, I’m autistic. I generally have a slightly harder time than average at figuring out what people mean by things. I am the target audience for tone indicators. it is, if done correctly, a good thing when people go out of their way to be considerate and spend extra effort clarifying their intent. my complaints, for the most part, are focused on one very specific tone indicator that’s like, actively bad at its alleged purpose. it’s not one of those rare ones people like to make fun of, it’s one that people actually use somewhat frequently. I’m jan Misali, and the “/hj” tone indicator is worse than useless. hj stands for “half-joking”. it’s used when a statement is a joke, but not completely a joke. what exactly this means depends on so many factors that it completely fails at the one thing a tone indicator is allegedly supposed to do. it’s just, inherently ambiguous. but in order to explain why, I’ll need to first explain how tone indicators work when they’re functioning as intended. s and /j the oldest and most popular tone indicator is /s, sarcasm. this notation isn’t like, super intuitive, given that “sarcastic” and “serious” begin with the same letter, but aside from that, I think it’s the most useful and practical tone indicator. figuring out when people are being sarcastic through text is hard, even for neurotypical people, I’m told. and that’s a big problem, because if someone’s being sarcastic, that drastically changes how you’re supposed to interpret what they mean, right? if someone says something like, say, “that’s great” sarcastically, it pretty much means the opposite of what it would mean if they said it sincerely. when someone’s speaking out loud, figuring out if they’re sarcastic requires analyzing the context and their tone of voice, and to have a decent mental model of what this specific person’s beliefs are. like, you gotta think “does this make sense for this person to say sincerely?”, and “if they were to say this sincerely, is this the way they would say it?”. or maybe this stuff just comes naturally to you and you don’t need to think about it. the point is, when communicating entirely through text, you lose a lot of the important information that’s usually necessary to infer if someone’s being sarcastic or not, and if you’re communicating through text with strangers on the internet, you also don’t have a good understanding of the specific person’s beliefs. and that’s what /s is for, or any of the other sarcasm indicators that predate it. it’s a way of bridging that gap. it’s saying, explicitly, “I’m being sarcastic, so you shouldn’t interpret this literally”. now, is /s the best way to do this? ehh, it’s arguable. it’s certainly the most convenient option from the perspective of the person who’s being sarcastic, but communication generally involves more than one person. to someone who doesn’t already know what the S stands for, this doesn’t mean anything. there’s a nontrivial step involved where you need to learn the system before it’s helpful for you, and the more of these abbreviations coexist, the more effort it takes to learn what they all mean. but that said, to me personally, the hard part of understanding sarcasm is always figuring out if someone’s being sarcastic or not. being told directly that something is sarcastic, even through somewhat cryptic means, genuinely skips most of the work of interpreting what someone is trying to say. /s communicates “I do not believe this. I am saying this because I think that contextually it would be funny if I did literally believe this”, and that’s like, actually helpful information, which normally would be difficult to infer through text alone. this is the ideal use case of a tone indicator. this is, theoretically, what they are for. another popular one is /j, which I also think is relatively useful as a tone indicator, for the same reasons. “joking” is a much broader idea than “sarcasm”, but it’s still very common for “I’m saying this as a joke” to be a useful thing to clarify about a statement. and there’s an important thing I’d like to emphasize about these two tone indicators in particular. the thing they’re communicating, “sarcasm” and “joking”, are both things that I have an understanding of, because I needed to develop an understanding of those things in order to communicate with people. those are just, required skills to have. it’s the same thing with like, how emoticons and emoji correspond to facial expressions and gesture, right? I’ve already spent my whole life learning by brute force what those things mean, so when a slightly altered version of those things appears online through text, I’m able to repurpose those skills to help me understand what these new things mean. like, none of this stuff comes naturally to me, it still takes conscious mental effort, but it’s all stuff I already had to learn how to do. the majority of tone indicators do not work like this. most of them are things like /nbh, for “nobody here”. it’s supposed to be used when you’re like, complaining about someone, but want to clarify that the person you’re talking about isn’t any of the people you’re currently talking to. this is not a tone of voice. this tone indicator is not indicating tone. there isn’t a corresponding thing people do when speaking out loud that I can interpret this as, it’s purely there to disambiguate. this one happens to be, once it’s explained to you what the abbreviation means, relatively straightforward, but it demonstrates that broadly speaking, the purpose of tone indicators is not to indicate tone, it’s to clarify intent. they’re like, one layer of abstraction removed from genuinely indicating tone, and because of that, they follow their own rules that need to be learned separately. and again, it’s on paper a good thing that some people want to be considerate and make the effort to communicate less ambiguously. if this system works, it’s a good, albeit flawed, idea. and I think that’s enough context for now. so, let’s talk about /hj. okay but like which half is the joke hj, half-joking, is currently one of the most popular tone indicators. anecdotally speaking, most of the time when I’ve seen people make short lists of the tone indicators they find the most useful, /hj usually makes it to the top five. unfortunately, “half-joking” doesn’t mean anything. “this statement is partially, but not completely, a joke” does not give me any information about what was meant by it, or how I should interpret it. and I’ll concede, for most people, this isn’t a problem. as I’ve learned from many conversations I’ve had about this topic, this isn’t even universally a problem for all autistic people. most people can see a statement with the extra clarification “I’m half-joking about this”, and I guess they just intuitively know what that’s supposed to mean. however, in my personal experience, whenever I’ve seen /hj in practice, it always takes me extra effort to figure out what the person meant by it. sometimes it takes me a few seconds, sometimes I need to think about it for a couple minutes, and in some cases I just never figure it out. the specific problem I have is that while “half-joking” tells me that some aspect of a statement is meant as a joke, it’s my responsibility, as the person being spoken to, to figure out exactly which part is the joke. it’s just, inherently ambiguous. that’s what I mean by “worse than useless”. when it’s used, it makes statements harder for me to interpret than they otherwise would be, which is the opposite of what tone indicators are for. and, quick side-note, in practice whenever I ask people which half of a half-joke is “the joke”, they usually tell me that I’m misunderstanding what half-joking is supposed to mean. half-joking just means “somewhere between serious and joking”, it doesn’t literally mean that one part is serious and another part is not. and this clarification is frustrating, because it’s avoiding answering my question. like, from my perspective, just trying to figure out how to interpret their statement, “somewhere between serious and joking” means the same thing as “partially but not completely joking”. all it tells me is that interpreting it as serious is wrong, and that interpreting it as a joke is also wrong, and that’s just, unhelpful. so, from my years of experience of like, asking people what they mean by things, then asking people what they mean by saying they’re “half-joking”, then asking what they mean by their descriptions of what “half-joking” means, I’ve been able to narrow down /hj into three main definitions. and I’d like to stress that, one, these definitions are all commonly used, and two, these definitions are mutually exclusive. all three of them imply completely different things both in terms of intent and in terms of how I’m supposed to interpret things. the first definition, which I think is the most common way half-joking is used, is that the statement itself is a joke, but that the underlying sentiment is true. the literal text is not serious, but the idea it communicates is serious. people sometimes explain this as “it’s a joke, but there’s some truth to it”. a use case for this would be something like “this cat video is the greatest work of cinema of the past century /hj”. the literal text is not serious (they don’t think the video is that good), but the idea it communicates is serious (they still enjoyed the video). it’s non-literal, but it’s sincere. the second way half-joking is used is when the statement itself is literally true, but it’s being said as a joke. the literal text is serious, but the idea it communicates is not. a use case for this second definition would be something like “this cat video is the greatest work of cinema of the past century /hj”. the literal text is serious (they genuinely are unaware of any film from the past hundred years that they enjoy more than this cat video), but the idea it communicates is not (they recognize that this is a funny opinion for someone to have). it’s literal, but it’s a joke. and like, these two things, they’re different! like, yeah, they’re both expressing a positive opinion, but other than that? for the first one, the statement itself isn’t meant to be interpreted literally, and the positive opinion isn’t meant to be funny, but for the second one, the statement itself is meant to be interpreted literally, and the positive opinion is meant to be funny. like, these are mutually exclusive! am I supposed to interpret the statement literally at face value, or is it an exaggeration? am I expected to find the opinion being expressed funny or not? the coexistence of these two common definitions means that /hj on its own gives contradictory answers to both of these questions. the other primary meaning of half-joking is a little harder to explain, but the idea is that it’s using this ambiguity, on purpose. like, someone who’s aware that /hj means multiple things can use it to be noncommittal about something. either they don’t want people to know what they mean by it, or they themself haven’t decided what they mean by it, and they’re waiting to see how people respond first. so, an example of when this might be used in practice might be “this cat video is the greatest work of cinema of the past century /hj”. maybe they genuinely love this cat video, maybe they only like it a little bit, maybe they actually think it’s a pretty bad video and are saying this completely as a joke, or maybe they have no strong feelings about this video at all and just want to see what other people think about it. I have mixed feelings about this third use. on one hand, this is really obviously a bad thing for a tone indicator to mean, right? if tone indicators are an accessibility feature that exist to help people understand what’s intended by things, then this achieves the opposite of that. it’s deliberately making things unclear. it’s not disambiguating, it’s, ambiguating. on the other hand, yeah, that’s the point. they’re not trying to clarify what they mean and failing, they’re successfully making things less clear. if anything, this is the best possible thing to use /hj for. this tone indicator is confusing, so if you use it with the intent of confusing people, you’re using it correctly. however, this is the least common of the three main meanings, and it only exists because of the ambiguity between the other two. and even if you for some reason don’t agree with me that the first two meanings are significantly different, the existence of this intentionally ambiguous meaning, which I’ll emphasize again is a real way people use it in practice, this alone means that using /hj in the same way as other tone indicators like /s is unhelpful. oh, also, if you’re a /hj user and you’re thinking “wait, none of those definitions are how I use /hj!”, then congratulations, that’s a fourth definition, making it even more ambiguous. anyway, from my perspective, the person who needs to interpret what people are saying, I really don’t think /hj is the best way to clarify, like, any of these use cases, right? like, “a joke that has some element of truth to it” is just... a joke. like, that’s already the distinction between /s and /j, right? /j means something is a joke and shouldn’t be interpreted literally, but that it’s not necessarily sarcastic. and then, “this is literally true but it’s funny” just straight up shouldn’t require a tone indicator. if it’s literally true, that doesn’t really change how I should interpret the meaning of it. we already have a plethora of internet words for communicating that something is funny to varying degrees without changing the surface-level interpretation of the text. just use one of those! and if you’re trying to be ambiguous, then like, I guess /hj works for that. because it is ambiguous. but uh, it’s still a weird thing to use a tone indicator for. okay, I’m going to need to go into another example. like, the cat video sentence was pretty contrived. I came up with that myself, and I like, don’t understand /hj, so it’s not really a representative thing to use. fortunately, back in 2021, after I had posted something expressing some of my /hj opinions on tumblr, someone anonymously sent me what they considered to be a good demonstration of when the tone indicator is useful. so, here’s their example. im going to buy an absurd amount of orange juice /hj i like /hj because if what i am saying literally is half joking im not going to put /j on it juice /hj” makes more sense than “im going to buy an absurd amount of orange juice /j” or “... /j /g” or “.../g” because i feel like “/j /g” is just contradictory whereas “/hj” i know its half joking this makes sense it’s been years now and I still cannot stop thinking about this. like, I understand that this as an example is probably not that much better than what I’ve been able to come up with, but this is so important to me. I need to talk about this. I’m going to walk through, step by step, my exact thought process for how I interpret this, and I want you to understand that like, I do this exact thing every single time I see /hj in practice. it is never intuitive to me. I always need to go through this methodical process of reverse engineering the original intent. okay. “I’m going to buy an absurd amount of orange juice /hj”. what the heck does this mean. “I’m going to buy an absurd amount of orange juice”, when interpreted literally, means they’re buying a lot of orange juice, and in fact the amount of orange juice they’re buying is “absurd”, meaning they think it’s funny how much orange juice they’re buying, because that’s what the word “absurd” means. okay, what would it mean to say this as a joke? if the whole joke is just that they think it’s funny how much orange juice they’re buying, then they wouldn’t have needed to use a tone indicator, because the word “absurd” already communicates that, and in context, they specifically said that this is a case where using a tone indicator makes sense, so they’re not just redundantly using a tone indicator without thinking about it. they’re definitely using it to mean something specific. the first non-literal interpretation that comes to mind is that they’re being ironic. they’re not really buying orange juice, but as a joke, they’re saying that they are. but okay, they didn’t say this is a joke, they said it’s a half-joke. so, their intent is some combination of the surface-level interpretation and reading it as ironic. so, what, maybe they’re not buying orange juice, but they consider zero orange juice to be an absurd amount? that would be a combination of those two interpretations, but I don’t know why someone would choose to express that idea as “I’m going to buy an absurd amount of orange juice (half-joking)”. can’t rule it out yet though. alternatively, maybe they are buying orange juice, but the amount of orange juice they’re buying isn’t absurd? okay, this one feels more plausible, I’ll investigate it further. assuming that’s what they mean, what would be the joke? they’re going to buy an ordinary amount of orange juice, and they’ve chosen to make a joke about this. so, they think that it’s funny how much orange juice they’re buying. as a joke, they’re calling the amount “absurd”, even though it isn’t really absurd. they think the amount of orange juice is funny, funny enough to joke about it, but the premise of the joke is that they’re claiming the amount of orange juice they’re buying is funny, even though it isn’t. so, they simultaneously believe that it’s a funny amount of orange juice and an unfunny amount of orange juice, which is a logical contradiction, and perhaps a type-five paradox. this would be a case of simultaneously joking and not joking, which is how the tumblr anon described their intent, but they also said that using both /j and /g, which I guess means “genuine”, would be “contradictory”, so whatever meaning they have in mind can’t be a contradiction like this. wait, can I just interpret this literally? I might have ruled that out too early. maybe they are just redundantly saying that it’s half-joking even though the words in the sentence already spell out directly that they think the amount of orange juice they’re buying is funny. and by this point I give up. having thought through multiple plausible but unsatisfying potential meanings, I cannot decide which one is the most likely. and again, I go through this whole thought process, or something like it, every single time I see /hj in the wild. it’s really frustrating and exhausting to go through, and even when I do eventually reach a conclusion for what I think the most likely meaning is, which isn’t guaranteed, I’m never like, confident that I understand what the intended meaning is. the bigger picture now, my goal here isn’t to like, tell people that they should cater the way they speak online to me personally. obviously, /hj means something to some people, and if it helps you communicate, great, more power to you. however, what is like, the point of tone indicators, if something like this exists, and is one of the most popular ones? are tone indicators an accessibility tool that help people communicate with those who otherwise would have a hard time inferring intent, or are tone indicators just trendy internet slang? because if they are just slang, then it’s like, really irresponsible for all those lists that circulate around to refer to tone indicators as an accessibility tool. and if they’re an accessibility tool, then it’s like, kinda a problem how malleable they are in terms of what they’re supposed to mean. people claim so often that tone indicators are for accessibility, that they’re specifically beneficial to autistic people, that I sort of have to assume that that’s how most people are trying to use them. tone indicators are a way of being polite, being extra clear about what you mean just to make sure people don’t misunderstand you. but in practice, people use tone indicators like they’re just trendy internet slang. people use “genuine” and “serious” for hyperbole and sarcasm, because of course they do. it would be unreasonable to expect that not to happen. tone indicators keep going in and out of fashion, and sometimes the same abbreviation can mean multiple separate tone indicators. /hyp is both “hypothetical” and “hyperbole”. and, okay this is so wild to me, one of the more popular ones is /pos for “positive”, and, I’m sorry, whose, idea was it? to have an abbreviation that’s used for “I don’t mean this as an insult”, be, “POS”? like, did nobody see the problem with that? how did this one catch on? and, what, the expectation is just that people who have a harder time communicating, the group of people that this accessibility tool is accommodating for, will be able to collectively keep up with all this stuff? I’m supposed to just know that it’s meant as a complement if someone says “wow! you’re such a nerd, slash piece of sh-” and like, even if tone indicators were used more consistently, even if things like “half-joking” weren’t part of the system, I think even in the best case this is still a misguided idea. because like, why are they even abbreviated? like, what is the benefit of having all of these be shorthand? like, my sincere apologies to people who are still using twitter, but character limits don’t really matter that much anymore. you can afford to just write out the whole word. this wouldn’t fix things like half-joking, but it would still be such a massive improvement. like, if you want to clarify what you mean by something, that’s, one of the main things that words are for. even better, just write an entire separate sentence clarifying what you mean. or, say, here’s a wild idea, what if instead of adding on an extra thing to clarify what you mean by something, you just rephrased the original sentence to be less ambiguous in the first place? like, just say what you mean directly. it’s worth giving a shot! so, here’s my conclusion. to people who use tone indicators as an accessibility tool, I appreciate the effort, but please try harder. write out the whole word, don’t expect people to memorize all these abbreviations, and just, stop using “half-joking” as a way to clarify intent. you always have better options at your disposal. and to people who use tone indicators as internet slang, I don’t know, just, be aware of the ways in which you could be misunderstood. be considerate to others, and make informed decisions about which methods of communicating specific ideas are the most appropriate for a specific situation. I’ve been jan Misali, and honestly I think these things worked way better back when people still included the opening HTML tag.