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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3150 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 24, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I am far beyond the age where I should even understand it, but I love no cap as a synonym for the honest truth.

It is hilarious when you stumble into a comment section of obvious bullshit and the comments are filled with 🧢 (It's a cap).

Huh, so that's what it means.

The likely etymology of that is interesting, as "no cap" might come from a bit of Twitch-"speak." On the website Twitch.tv, one of the global chat emotes (i.e. free for literally everyone to use) is "Kappa," which is a greyscale, low-resolution image of a headshot of one of Twitch's founding members (specifically Justin Kan himself, I believe). The Kappa emote is generally used to represent sarcasm, likely due to the monochrome smirk (or, at least, at that level of detail, it sure looks like a smirk) conveying a feeling of smugness and irony suited to Internet-dweller sensibilities.

So "no cap" probably started as "no Kap(pa)" and mutated from there.

Okay, this explains "kappa" which I remember from some time back and which I then assumed was meaningless .

At least the way I heard it used made it seem meaningless.

Know Your Meme suggests a different etymology, dating from as far back as the 80s in a rap context, and much more recently popularized via the Atlanta hip-hop scene. Wiktionary points specifically to the 2017 rap track "No Cap" by Future and Young Thug.

That's a lot more plausible, yeah.

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