Teh Explained

Teh is an Internet slang neologism most frequently used as an English article, based on a common typographical error of "the". Teh has subsequently developed grammatical usages distinct from the.^[1] It is not common in spoken or written English outside technical or leetspeak circles, but when spoken, it is pronounced,, or .^[2]

Usage

Teh originates from the common typo of the, as might both occur and remain uncorrected when a person was typing rapidly prior to the widespread availability of autocorrect helper applications, and has become conventionalized in a variety of contexts.

In addition, it is a standard feature of leetspeak^[3] and can be used ironically^[4] or to mock someone's lack of "techie" knowledge or skills, as an insult, or to reinforce a group's elitism;^[2] cf. eye dialect.

Notes and References

1. Ross. Nigel. Writing in the Information Age. English Today. 22. 3. 39–45. July 2006. 10.1017/S0266078406003063. 143850443.
2. Book: LeBlanc, Tracy Rene. "Is there a translator in house?": Cultural and discourse analysis of a virtual speech community on an internet message board. University of Louisiana at Lafayette. May 2005. 2007-07-06. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20070703100446/http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04072005-145922/unrestricted/LeBlanc_thesis.pdf. 2007-07-03.
3. Mirko. Tavosanis. A Causal Classification of Orthography Errors in Web Texts. IJCAI-07 Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (AND-07). 99–106. International Association for Pattern Recognition. 2007-01-08. Hyderabad, India. 2007-07-06.
4. Blashki. Katherine. Sophie Nichol . Game Geek's Goss: Linguistic creativity in young males within an online university forum (94/\/\3 933k'5 9055oneone). Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society. 3. 2. 77–86. 2005. 2007-07-06.