👉 Okay, alright settle down now, let’s tackle this…
thing
. You stumbled upon the baffling glyph of “
!0
." Now, immediately I sense some bewildered glances and maybe even a little digital sweat prickling your forehead. Don't freak out – we get there.
Basically, in its current obnoxious spread throughout online vernacular (largely thanks to early-era 4chan, honestly. Seriously, it started there. Blast from the past, isn’t that depressing?), "!0,!" is a deliberately bastardized and aggressively nonchalé way of saying… absolutely nothing. It's not an exclamation point! You wouldn’t shout "’!0,!' when you see a pretty girl! Unless, frankly, it would be very weird shouting anything at all. Let’s unpack the roots of this little monstrosity, because there are layers upon layers of… let’s just call it stylistic bad taste . Originally (and here I'm going to lean into some genuinely depressing history) in early ASCII art and BBS (Bulletin Board Systems—basically the dial-up equivalent of a Discord, you wouldn’t understand unless...) the "’!0,!" was meant as a shorthand way to designate a 0. You see, the number zero was notoriously difficult to render clearly on those old terminals. So someone would painstakingly create this little, almost insulting, zero, then slap that exclamation point and the "–
