Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.

Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand.

Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time.

From startups to scaleups, online, in person and on the go shopify is made for

entrepreneurs like you sign up for your one dollar a month trial at shopify dot com slash setup

welcome to the khaki ride home for Tuesday, December 15th, 2020.

I'm Jackson Bird.

What are tone indicators?

Where do they come from?

How are they used?

And a look at both the pre-internet history of tone indicators as well as the origin of the emoticon. And a question for the ages,

what was the deal with the leg lamp in a Christmas story? The explanation goes a little bit

deeper than you might think. Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

There was an interesting piece in the New York Times last week about the growing popularity of tone indicators in social media.

So this was something that I was only aware of on Reddit, where it's common to put a forward slash and the letter S at the end of a comment to indicate that you're being sarcastic,

just in case the people reading your comment miss that intent and then start arguing with you or report you or just think you're being a jerk.

I learned, however, that there are way more tone indicators than just for sarcasm.

And within certain corners of the internet, they're incredibly popular.

There are indicators for rhetorical questions, inside jokes,

sexual and non-sexual intent, hyperbole, and more.

And they follow the same format as the sarcasm one that I noted before.

At the end of your message, you type a forward slash followed by the letter or letters that people have agreed represent the tone.

...