Title text:
In 1899, people were walking around shouting ‘23’ at each other and laughing, and confused reporters were writing articles trying to figure out what it meant.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3184/
You must log in or # to comment.
231, twenty three is number one!
Have we all forgotten about 80085?
I didnt. I think about them everyday.
It’s in the panel
Doh!
I’m still disappointed that 27 never managed to get on this list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2-7CqYFi64
8647
I feel like (6, 7) should definitely be a tuple
6’7" is a non integer measurement.
It’s got nothing to do with height. It’s a Chicago police code for murder. The rapper whose song this was taken from is from Chicago and the the context in which it appears in those lyrics make it clear it’s also about murder.
The 6’7” thing was made up by people trying to find reason or rhyme as to why a shibboleth they didn’t know would be said at a basketball game and inventing that it had to be connected to the height of one player.
Skrilla is from Philadelphia, where the police apparently don’t use 10-67, but it’s “Report of Death” in some areas so this still seems the most likely explanation.
Sorry, you’re right. Philadelphia
Maybe not a teen thing, but among children I think “because 789” could bring 789 into the discussion.
That only works in English though and while it does have a pun, I dont see it gaining any cult status…
1337 also only works in English.
The cult status is a good point, though.
1337 also only works in English.
What are you on about. It’s shortened from “elite.” You think that only works in English?
Really?
Afrikaans:elite Akan:nnipa atitiriw Albanian:elite Amharic:ልሂቃን Arabic:نخبة Armenian:էլիտար Assamese:অভিজাত শ্ৰেণী Aymara:élite ukax mä jach’a uñacht’äwiwa Azerbaijani:elit Bambara:elite (jamanatigiba). Basque:elitea Belarusian:эліта Bengali:অভিজাত Bhojpuri:अभिजात वर्ग के लोग के Bosnian:elita Bulgarian:елит Catalan:elit Cebuano:elite Chichewa:osankhika Chinese (Simplified):精英 Chinese (Traditional):精英 Corsican:elite Croatian:elita Czech:elita Danish:elite Divehi:އެލައިޓް އެވެ Dogri:अभिजात वर्ग Dutch:elite Esperanto:elito Estonian:eliit Ewe:ame ŋkutawo Filipino:elite Finnish:eliitti French:élite Frisian:elite Galician:elite Ganda:abakulu Georgian:ელიტა German:Elite Goan Konkani:अभिजात वर्ग Greek:αφρόκρεμα Guarani:élite rehegua Gujarati:ભદ્ર Haitian Creole:elit Hausa:fitattu Hawaiian:elite Hebrew:עִלִית Hindi:अभिजात वर्ग Hmong:cov neeg tseem ceeb Hungarian:elit Icelandic:Elite Igbo:ndị isi Iloko:elite ti Indonesian:elite Irish:mionlach Italian:elite Japanese:エリート Javanese:elit Kannada:ಗಣ್ಯರು Kazakh:элита Khmer:វរជន Kinyarwanda:intore Korean:엘리트 Krio:elit dɛn Kurdish (Kurmanji):elît Kurdish (Sorani):نوخبە Kyrgyz:элита Lao:ຊັ້ນສູງ Latin:electi Latvian:elite Lingala:elite ya bato ya lokumu Lithuanian:elitas Luxembourgish:elite Macedonian:елита Maithili:अभिजात वर्ग Malagasy:sangany Malay:elit Malayalam:വരേണ്യവർഗം Maltese:elite Maori:rangatira Marathi:अभिजन Mizo:elite te an ni Mongolian:элит Myanmar (Burmese):အထက်တန်းစား Nepali:कुलीन Northern Sotho:maemo a godimo Norwegian:elite Odia (Oriya):ଅଭିଜିତ Oromo:elite jedhamuun beekama Pashto:اشراف Persian:نخبه Polish:elita Portuguese:elite Punjabi:ਕੁਲੀਨ Quechua:elite nisqa Romanian:elită Russian:элита Samoan:tagata maualuluga Sanskrit:अभिजात वर्ग Scots Gaelic:mionlach Serbian:елита Sesotho:phahameng Shona:elite Sindhi:اشرافيه Sinhala:ප්රභූ Slovak:elita Slovenian:elita Somali:akhyaarta Spanish:élite Sundanese:élit Swahili:wasomi Swedish:elit Tajik:элита Tamil:உயரடுக்கு Tatar:элита Telugu:ఉన్నతవర్గం Thai:ผู้ลากมากดี Tigrinya:ኤሊት ዝበሃሉ ምዃኖም ይፍለጥ Tsonga:va xiyimo xa le henhla Turkish:seçkinler Turkmen:elita Ukrainian:еліта Urdu:اشرافیہ Uyghur:سەرخىللار Uzbek:elita Vietnamese:ưu tú Welsh:elitaidd Xhosa:abaphezulu Yiddish:עליט Yoruba:olutayo Zulu:elite Hebrew:עִלִית Javanese:elit
I’m not gonna format that but as you can see there’s quite a few languages which use essentially the same word, and thus it works quite as well.
It’s still language specific and most of these wouldn’t work.
Why is 二百五 (250) not on there lol
Deaf people - 258 (very interesting) and 84 (there’s no good direct translation for this)
Huh, I had never considered deaf slang before. Is there somewhere to read up on this?
Hmm, it’s hard to think of good resources for this. It’s just kinda part of community. You could google asl slang and look around in YouTube or something. Or learn asl (or your country’s sign language) and join the community.
Found a link with a short quip about 258 lol
I don’t get the 258 and 84 one, also deaf.
258 = very interesting. 2 being v, you sign “very”, and then using 5 into 8 from ahead of your face/nose area for “interest” sign.
And for 84, try and sign it kinda side way. Kinda like “terrible” sign, but you would say it after crazy or whatever happened.
Like “oh really? 84!”
Ah then it’s probably a different sign language, mine does not do it like that.
For millennials, like ma: 1337 means “LEET” which is short for “Elite”.
Also for geeky Gen X
I’m confused as to where you fit in the Millennial demographic for you to have not known this already
It seems, I’m on the older side.
if you’re in your 40s and don’t know this i’m worried.
Removed by mod
Had a friend who wrote his french oral presentation out in 1337, he was allowed notes but not the word for word presentation. He showed the teacher beforehand, she said that’s fine, looks like gibberish.
I did that too, but back then it was called Backtrack Linux. I bought a special Atheros chipset WiFi card for my laptop’s PCMCIA slot. The built-in 802.11b WiFi card worked under Linux but only by using the Windows ME driver in NDISWrapper, which didn’t support promiscuous mode.
The Atheros chipsets could be configured (by flashing the firmware with a blob I got from a BBS, if I recall) to capture the traffic from nearby wireless networks. In particular, I wanted to pick up the signal from when a device first connects. There was a bug in Windows XP that could cause the WiFi to drop briefly, then promptly reconnect. By triggering that bug over and over I could capture a lot of reconnect packets in a short time frame.
Then I’d save the data to a big file and pipe it to Aircrack and extract the Wired Equivalent Privacy password.
I was a 1337 H4XX0|2 B-)
Tap for spoiler
Well, that’s how the tutorial said it would work anyway. I actually never could get enough packets captured. The signal strength was too low
Just to toss this in there, it totally wasn’t a bug, you were sending a deauth packet to force them to reconnect then recapturing their auth sequence until you had enough packets to crack the WEP key. A pretty fun demo back then was to setup a wireless bridge between an open public network and a rogue AP (usually we’d just use a pcmcia WiFi card bridge to the internal WiFi adapter); then (due to pretty much no https anywhere), you could follow peoples browsing habits, log into their MySpace/LiveJournal/DeadJournal/GeoCities/etc (passwords were pretty commonly passed in plaintext), etc.
It was never done nefariously, but allowed us to learn a lot.
Same, but I was 15 like 15 years later lol
Y35!
What the h311 is wrong with you? Us millennials invented 1337!
Nope. Source: am gen X.
Y2K
I remember it well.
The newspapers were apoplectic about the coming millennium bug Armageddon (hospital equipment was all going to crash because programmers encoded a date as two digits to save what was then rather sparse memory and storage space, and everyone was going to accidentally become of negative age and all timers would temporarily give very wrong answers.
COBOL programmers: there’s a serious issue with banking and other business systems and we need to concentrate on this above above other issues to resolve it
Managers and newspapers: ARMAGEDDON!
COBOL programmers: we’ve got this.
Newspapers: nobody is doing anything about it! Armageddon!
COBOL programmers: It’s a lot of work but we’re cracking on, we’ve been working at it a while and it’s going to be tight and we’re going to need to put in some overtime, but really, we’ve got this.
Newspapers: OH FUCK LITERALLY EVERYTHING IS GOING TO CRASHMillienium dawns. Some slight issues remain. Most important systems already patched and fine. Society does not crash.
Newspapers: There was no millennium bug after all!
COBOL programmers: no, there was, but we fixed it like we said we needed to and then we did. Boy, that was hard work.
Newspapers: It was ALL A HOAX.
COBOL programmers: no, it was a problem and we fixed it.
Newpapers: CELEBRITY WOMAN WEARS DRESS.
COBOL programmers: we just see the world differently, I guess. Can I retire early with all this emergency business critical overtime money?Ahahah I experienced only the media narrative, and it did play out exactly as you described it.
Of course now it comes to reason that many people were actively working to fix the problem, but they never really explained that part on TV.
Yep I think pops here has this one, us Millennials grew up with leet speak, it already was a thing in the 80s.
Yeah it was common on BBSes late 80s at least. Also am gen X.
That’s the first time anyone called me pops! NOW I feel old!
Sorry to hear that, gramps!
(Am also Gen X. Sigh…)
If you’re GenX and no one has called you pops before you have lived a Sheltered life
People get confused because leet speak had a resurgence around 1997 or so.
Ragebait. Millenials are like 40 and have back pain.
84CK P41N
D0/\/'7 m4k3 f|_|/\/ 0f /\/\y 84(k
I can confirm you can in fact get back pain before the age of 40
Batman can confirm too.
Source: Knightfall.
Sorry, what? I’m a millennial, this is common knowledge for anyone who played a videogame in the last quarter century.
I was going to say, I think the perpetuation of leetspeak and most of its use falls squarely into the millennial generation’s early 90s into the early 2000s.
1337 h4x0r
Hack the planet
I know it just means you aren’t familiar with it but it’s funny you picked the millennial one as the one you had to explain to millennials.
Millenials pwnd the n00bs with the best of the genX back in the day, but I think leetspeak was a lot more niche than say 67 is, it was very gamercoded/nerdcoded when that wasn’t cool.
Source: am millenial who had a leetspeak AIM handle back then
back when the internet was not cool
The internet used to be a place
oh they had designers then
If you’re gonna include 23 skidoo… You should include being at sixes and sevens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sixes_and_sevens
67… Is very very old British slang for wrecked/confused, at odds, or hysterical.
“I was all 6’s and 7’s”
Dressed to the nines no less.
We better 86 it with all this numbers business tho.
Schfifty-five.
Shiggity shawh
all the older ones at least had some kind of meaning behind them, this new shit is actual brainrot.
What did 23 mean? I thought the post was pointing out it meant nothing? 69 is a position, 420 smoke weed, boobs, 42 was a nonsense joke that meant nothing as well. They just defined it as the meaning of life for no reason from what I know… so 23, and 67 seem about the same, running closely behind 42
23 was before my time, but it is 1/3 of 69, so there’s that.
Ni
Ni’s NaN though and they no longer say it.
Japanese would argue otherwise, 二 is certainly a number.
42 is from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. They built an enormous computer called Deep Thought that was the most powerful ever built to calculate the ultimate answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The computer, after 75 million years of processing, came up with 42. The confused crowd that gathered to hear the answer did not understand. Turns out, 42 is the correct answer, but what is the question?
So after that, they decide to build another computer, which is planet Earth, to figure out the question.
Yeah I remember that, saying 42 is the answer to everything was what I called nonsense, as I could just as easily say 42 meaning everything is, more like 6 7 being nothing. Poof, now everything is a multiple of nothing, and at the end of the day none of it made any sense or had any meaning
Funny enough, there’s a point in a later book in the series where they suggest the “ultimate question’” that 42 is an answer to could be “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”
Which works in base 13!
which, when a mathemagician occasionally asked adams about it, he would respond along the lines of “oh fuck”
Im 93% sure that 6*9 doesnt equal 42 in base 6227020800
Additionally, while technically imbued with ‘meaning’, even the number 420 itself is somewhat meaningless and was originally used to delineate those who knew from those who don’t. It’s just that it got famous enough that we now almost all know.
In that sense I would argue it filled more or less the same function as 67.
I’d like to add that that’s called a shibboleth :)
I’ve heard it said that 420 referred to the time 4:20 pm, when a group would come together to smoke, but that sounds contrived.
420 can also refer to the birth date of Adolf Hitler, which makes 420 a bit darker than just “haha, smoke.”
23 is from the movie of the guy escaping from the number 23 I think?
Oh shit I forgot that movie, that was a Jim Carrey movie wasn’t it
I think so
Thank you. I didn’t know what 23 was about
What’s the meaning of 42? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
It’s the answer
But what is the question?
That is the real question!
It was Jackie Robinson’s number
Some kind of meaning behind them, huh?
Let me ask you something.
Can you count…
All the way…
To shfifty-five?
But this isn’t even a fair comparison because that’s literally a whole ass song with an animation compared to a dumb kid in some viral video saying six or seven
Shwam.
Doo.
Two and helf.
Scheven.
Schfourteen-teen.
Shwenty One.
Shwenty-Seven and Helf
27
37
WHAT YOU SAY?!!
I have said “schfourteen-teen” about once per week for the past 20 years
…I’m not sure anyone has ever gotten the reference
It’s the children who are wrong
What
67 is the police code for a homocide. Kids just didn’t understand it and thought it referred to something else.
I thought that’s 187
187 is homicide, yes, but it says there 67 is homocide. You’re welcome.
That might just be California. In standard “10” police codes, it’s 67. https://www.police1.com/resources/articles/police-codes-VqFqvwMyjl6GES0f/
In California it’s 187.
And now I gotta listen to sublime
That number is just an example of a specific category of absurd humor. It’s rare to see that sort of thing applied to numbers though. In other situations, we’ve all seen it. Just repeat any dumb thing a hundred times and suddenly it becomes funny. You could look at pretty much any TV comedy. Pick any decade, like 60’s, 70’s, 90’s or whatever. The rule is very simple: Just repeat it and it becomes funny at some point.
You could also say that the seeds of brain rot are older than we dare to admit. The 2020s just distilled it to its purest form yet.
What’s funnier than 24?
25
Ok boomer
What about Schfifty-Five?
Fourteen-teen
Three fiddy?
Tree-fiddy came so close to making the list I think but it feels right that it didn’t.
Shiggity Schwat
Girlfriend’s age?
My IQ
8675309
