“kthxbye” explained

I have been teaching my parents internet slang lately. We’ve noticed that it’s becoming quite common for me to use it in conversation and messaging, leaving them puzzled. They are extremely literate folks — both were English teachers — but it’s an old-school literacy, because, well, they are old. 😉 Despite being amazingly tech savvy for their age, they are largely oblivious to internet slang (although it can be funny what has trickled through to them).

“Kthxbye” was particularly interesting for me to look into. Here’s how I explained it to them…

“Kythxbye” (also often “kthxbai”, or even just “bai”) is one of the oldest and most famous pieces of internet slang and/or textspeak (actually lolspeak, more below). It is a contraction of “okay, thanks, goodbye” and it’s used to close a conversation or conclude a point with dismissive confidence, or even sarcastic contempt (“what you said isn’t even worth responding to, there is nothing else to say”). Its usage is basically identical to the usage of “mic drop”.

In the past, it was a bit harsher. Lately it is gotten watered down by age and popularity, and has become much more whimsical, strongly connoting a wink.

The origins of kthxbai are murky. Kthxbye probably came from an early lolcat, but no one seems to know for sure, and it is definitely lolspeak (see also “oh hai”). This is basically what lolspeak is: much like textspeak, but specifically arising from captions on funny/cute animal pictures, especially the lolcats. It’s basically the if-animals-could-talk language: they would speak adorably broken and simplistic English, of course. Practically the moment people started captioning animal photos like this, they started quoting the popular ones in their text messaging, and so it merged almost seamlessly into textspeak, and yet does remain a distinctive (”cute”) subcategory of textspeak.