We Speak Tech
Why's This Funny?
Our funny: explained.
What WTF is and Why We Think It's Useful
Why's This Funny, adorably shortened to WTF, explains Shmoop's humor and conversational language. When you click one of our Why's This Funny "pins," a new window will open. In that window, you'll find a phrase or a couple short sentences explaining the joke, idiom, or cultural reference immediately preceding the pin. Whatever phrase we're explaining also appears near the top of the window in quotation marks and bold font (e.g., "LOL" ). They look just like this: You can't actually click this one, but if you could, it would open a new window like so:
Now that you understand what WTF is, we bet you're dying to know why we've got it on site. Well, not everyone finds our humor and abbrevs easy to understand at a first glance. Maybe you're just learning English, and so you've never heard the expression, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." (This phrase is a way of pointing out the similarities between people, especially those between a child and a parent.) Since we want all of our readers to understand every last word we've written, we hope that WTF will help.
It may also be useful to those of you who are well-versed in English but who are unfamiliar with contemporary American pop culture references—which we admit we're a bit obsessed with making. It's hard for us to believe that, like, OMG, not everyone knows who Taylor Swift is. But we reluctantly accept this truth. And while we're on the topic, we do speak student. However, we want to make sure we speak parent and teacher as well. So if you're not hip to lingo like "LOL" (newsflash: it means, "laugh(ing) out loud"), our WTF pins might also be useful to you.
So, we've got the basic facts laid out. Next, we want to give you a pro tip. If you register with us, our social profile gives you the option of making the WTF pins visible or not. When you go to edit the profile, you'll see a radio button like this:
We've got our WTFs active, obvi. ("Obvi" means "obviously.") If the learning guide you came from doesn't have any WTFs, don't worry, we're crafting and adding new ones each month. And that, Shmoopers, is all she wrote. That is, unless you have questions. If so, feel free to give us a holler at support@shmoop.com.