The Etymology of UwU

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oh wo

oo woo oo woo

I imagine that you are
familiar with uwu as a meme

something
people say when they're kind of trying
to be annoying or ironic or make fun of
this

overly cutesy way of speaking that
you associate with furries or cat girls

is that what the kids are doing these
days cat girls

but have you ever asked
yourself why

what why what is this uwu

uwu

that's not similar to any sort of
existing English word why are we saying
that

why

how did we as a society land on
this being a normal thing to say

well
okay I'm going to be real I was feeling
a little bit uninspired this week

nothing on my long list of video ideas
that I have was really doing it for me

so of course I took to Tumblr I asked
for video idea suggestions

and somebody
suggested I look in to the history of
uwu

and I immediately thought oh my God
yeah what is the deal with uwu

creative
block just immediately obliterated thank
you

this is what I have decided I need
to know about

tasty treat for my brain
and for yours now as well

because I am
very excited to tell you that oouo has a
surprisingly interesting and winding
internet history

but before we go any
further further a word from today's
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and now I return you to
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what we
know for certain about uwu to start off
is that it was never intended to be a
word

an

it started out as an emoticon an
expressive face made out of keyboard
characters to help convey tone when
typing

you know in like ye olden days
before emojis were a thing

there have
been two cited supposed origins or
earliest known usages of uwu

a Yu-Gi-Oh
fanfiction from 2005 which was thought
to be the earliest for a long time

and a
post on a furry Forum from the year 2000
which was found more recently

are either
of these
things legitimate milestones in the
history of uwu

I'm going to tell you
because surprisingly despite how old
both of these posts are I have managed
to talk to the authors of both

and I've
got some answers for you

regarding the
Yu-Gi-Oh fanfiction it's entitled Genie
of the puzzle and was posted to
fanfiction on that in October of 2005

the opening author's note States

we
Sarah reu lover forever was my 200th
reviewer I'm sorry this took so long
smack self

again feel free to throw
squids and fish at me uwu I know I
deserve it

this is just a little filler
to prove I'm not dead things start
getting interesting next chapter

the
person who contacted me claiming
authorship of this fanfiction was
upfront about the fact that

they do not
have access to the account anymore and
can't exactly prove that it's them

but
given that they wanted to remain
anonymous anyway and weren't making any
sort of bold claims like having invented
uwu

like I don't really see what there
is to gain from lying about this

I don't
think I have any reason not to believe
them so I asked them a couple questions
about how uwu made its way into their
vocabulary around 2005

so i asked

so according to
the author of one Yu-Gi-Oh fanfiction
that is probably older than some of you
watching this video right now

according
to them it was like a common alternative
to almost like a smiley face emoji

except mimicking a cute anime character-
like expression

so at the time it was
just a genuine cute Emoji

it didn't have
any of the irony you usually associate
with it now at least in my circles

it
was just a genuine smiley face but cuter
and more anime

I also 100% did not make
it up I don't know the technicalities of
how they landed on my Fick for it but it
was widely used in like aim IRC all the
popular weeb chat channels of the time

which is how it got into my vocab

at
this point the uwu emoticon already had
a lot of really similar looking emoticon
siblings

and these emoticons had logic
to them

the U's in uwu were closed eyes
the W was a cat-like mouth

thus giving
oo this General Vibe of cuteness and
serenity and general happiness

so that's
where it was at in 2005

but we can go
earlier at some point in the past year I
think so so pretty recently an even
earlier usage of uwu was discovered

at

it's
from a post on a very old furry Art
website called vcl

or Vixen controlled
Library I don't think this website
exists anymore I think we just have this
post from archives

here's a close-up
portrait of Felina I kind of messed up
with the Photoshop on this one

I think
the burn tool would have been better
than painting over the lines uwu

it
was made on April 11th 2000 which is
wait oh my God what day is it today

it's
April 9th the day that I'm filming this
oh my God

edit this video in 2 days so I
can post it on the 24th birthday of oooo

no the sponsor will not approve it in
that short of a time it would have been
so good it would have been so good

so
this post was made by an artist named
jlan delier

I am pronouncing that to the
best of my ability his Twitter bio
claims creator of uwu

though he told me
that there very well could be earlier
usages of it found because it really
wasn't that unique

as far as he
remembers and it it was 24 years ago but
as far as he remembers

uwu was a variant
that he created on this Emoji which was
already a variant of this Emoji

but
remember the U's in uwu are swapped in
as opposed to other eye variants to
signify closed eyes

and in this context
jlan says he was using it to Cony
sadness actually

he was disappointed
with the way that the drawing he posted
that day had turned out

while the closed
eyes of uwu were later agreed upon to be
Serene and happy

his intuition behind
giving it closed eyes was to make it sad
which I think is so interesting

wich

um in
the earliest example we have of it being
used it's being used to mean the
complete opposite of what it means now

this is at this point the earliest usage
of oouo that we have

but it probably
isn't the origin of uwu

like it's not
like he created it in this post and then
it caught on from that specific point

I
think g l was extremely informative um
when he told me about how it it was very
influenced by previous otoc cons

and
other people easily could have come up
with it as well

and I think that is
likely a lot of people probably did
think of something like this
independently

and you know eventually a
meaning was widely agreed upon by the
community

so now we need to talk a
little bit more about emoticons in the
early 2000s

both jlan delier and the
author of the Yu-Gi-Oh fanfiction
brought up camoji

Japanese emoticons
with a decidedly cute aesthetic
emphasizing large eyes

while Western
emoticons have typically focused on the
mouth to convey expression

Japanese
mocon focus more on the eyes

they're
thought to have originally been
popularized by manga fans in Japan in
the ' 80s and '90s

and later in the late
'90s early 2000s made their way into
Western internet users vocabularies
through anime fandom

which of course has
a not in significant overlap with
furries

and I think we can absolutely
see the influence of cjis on uwu

especially when we look at the camoji
cat face

other examples like the the
camoji used in that that popular hold my
flower tumblr post

these are I think the
predecessors to oo I think that oo and
its similar looking cousin emoticons

i think

were easy ways of typing almost camoji
looking emoticons on Western keyboards

I
received a lot of testimonies from very
helpful people on Tumblr regarding the
early 2000s popularity of this kind of
calois on Western keyboards

hybrid
emoticon style that was going on

I
remember seeing it on AIM in the early
2000s I always saw it as an offshoot of
this more popular style of emotes

it
used W as the mouth because it looked
like a monster or an animal mouth so a
lot of furries and weebs would use it

it's possible that it had multiple
heritages though mixing together
Japanese and western style emotes

oh
yeah playing around with the mouth used
in emotes was a common thing people did

smiley face mouth versus this smiley
face mouth versus V mouth or the three
for the mouth

or line mouth versus dot
mouth versus three mouth for vertical
ones

so using W as a mouth was kind of
just another one of those I remember
seeing the line and the dot mouths the
earliest to the rest coming later

in the
mid 2000s I knew someone who used it
alongside this emote and they said this
one is kind of like a happy face

and ooo
is more pensive and I don't know what to
think anymore with the popular usage
nowadays

I remember it being part of the
random aesthetic I.E oooo gomsu

oh my
God thank you for that

from what I
remember from the early 2010s on Tumblr
and Deviant Art it was used as an the
Micon representation of a relaxed but
happy cutesy anime face

it kind of
became this way of showcasing you were
an anime loving glomping squeeing kind
of person trying to evoke the mannerisms
and movements of a cute anime girl

not
necessarily all mutually inclusive

at
least that's how it was used in circles
I was in

folks have said it but as
someone who has been in the anime
Community Minds for years it's basically
simplified camoji

a lot more elaborate
camoji using stuff in Japanese keyboards
or obscure symbols

I'm not sure if I saw
ooo specifically in my deviant art or
Gaia days because no one was being
bashful there

which is what ooo
originally kind of indicates

it's like
Serene closed eyes and Cat mouth but I
saw plenty of this and this and the
occasional Oho

people mention seeing it
on a whole variety of sites Dev in art
omigle for Affinity Guy online live
Journal Myspace and even anime roleplay
communities on Facebook

so it was very
popular in those sorts of spaces but not
outside of them

in fact association with
with those particular fandom subculture
niches kind of made oooo cringe

FES and
anime fans get a lot of [ __ ] okay we all
we all know that

they they get made fun
of a lot um and

so ooo was considered uh
like a signifier of cringe

and then
around the mid 2010s oh my God

it
breached containment the first posts
that more widely called attention to oo
being a thing

were Tumblr posts I
believe

generally these posts leaned
into the fact that it was considered
cringe sprinkled it in to get a reaction
out of people

to make their trolling
extra annoying

to make fun of the type
of person who would unironically use oo

apparently there was a brief Kur fuffle
created by like Tumblr social justice
types

basically saying that oooo was
going to become a way for old creeps to
mimic the speech of young kids and
pretend to be young kids on the internet
to pray on
them

really really dumb

but it all
contributed to the larger internet's
knowledge of Ooo existing

and it's not
necessarily easy I think to decipher
ooo as like an emoticon

something that's
supposed to look like a face at a first
glance

you know at least to Western
audiences who are used to looking at
Western emoticons

this doesn't
necessarily look like one at first to a
lot of people

so they started
pronouncing it as a word

we're so
accustomed to hearing it out loud now

like we're so accustomed to saying it
oooo it's oooo

is a word that you can
say with your mouth

um but it's it's
really significant I don't want to gooss
over this point

because it's really
significant that it went from an image

like a soundless image of a face a an
emoticon

the fact that it went from that
to a word that you say is huge

and that
was the result of it breaching
containment of these small communities

that understood how it was supposed to
be read

it totally changed what ooo is

but we're not done because in the late
2010s ooo just absolutely skyrocketed in
popularity

alongside of course its
variant Oho

following emoticon logic oh
wo would be a version with like wide
open eyes

therefore making it more
shocked or curious

hence the hence the
popular phrase oh wo what's this

and
then there
was and

then there was the copy pasta

the copy pasta that starts raar nuzzles
you how are you pounces on you you're so
warm oo woo

uh and then proceeds to get
extremely sexual from there

that copy
pasta

there was that

and then in 2018
somebody decided to make a rap version
of it and post it on YouTube

XTR nozes pounces on you oo you're so
warm

and um yeah that this happened it
became an extremely popular Tik Tok song

one of you told me on Tumblr that oo Woo
is for and I quote catg girls with
purple LEDs on Twitch

um and others
noted this kind of mysterious Resurgence
and popularity among the younger
generation or connected it to Tik Tok
Fashions

and you guys are not crazy okay
we have the graph

not not that we have
the graph

so this talk TR adapted from
this YouTube video adapted from this
coffee pasta

uh adapted from I guess a
wider culture of ironically or making
fun of oooo

um is the reason why it is
so popular right now

what's really
interesting to me is that if you look at
the copy pasta

that was you know
responsible for this huge Trend that
made oo popular

ooo isn't spelled oooo
in it

it's spelled like this

but the
video that adapted it pron anounced it
oooo

oooo has transcended oooo

do do you
understand

do I understand

okay let's
look at another post that is famously
associated with oo

the hello Mr Obama
then Parish roleplay post from T

I'm
sorry if you don't know what I'm talking
about

hello is anybody there

cave slowly
begins to fill with water

hello please
somebody help me hello

you can feel the
surface of the water barely lapping at
you

no no no no hello hello help me

God
West your soul hello ma'am why are you
doing this to me

hello help me
please

Mr Obama is that you hello please
help me

I seem to be in a little bit of
trouble Mr Obama

hello hello

M

Please Mr
Obama please save me I don't want to die

hello Mr Obama are you still
there

m

Mr Obama please I'm drowning
hello I'm scared

I'll do anything for
you Mr Obama please help

anything

anything for you Mr Obama

then perish

oooo never appears in this post either

just hello and please and other sort of
oooo ified words

oooo speak has come to
mean either like a cutesy childlike
voice

uh such as we see used in the song
version

or this like fully oooo ified
language

as is very nice nicely put by
this tweet oooo is a way of life

oooo is
a way of life now

it's a word you say
rather than just an emoticon you use
when you're trying to convey that you
are cute

it's a way of speaking in a
cutesy way

it's a way of typing words to
convey that you're speaking in a cutesy
way

it's a word you say when you're
trying to be annoying or ironic and make
fun of people who want to be cute

and
finally at the very bottom of the list
you may somewhere still find people who
are using ooo as

an emoticon that looks
like a a happy cat-like face

oo woo
continues to transcend

and I wish you
all of the oo wooing you could ever
desire in your life

I this honestly this
was a fun thing for my brain to chew on
this week

if you guys have any more
suggestions that are kind of up this
alley of like

things I can research kind
of quickly

but that are still like
surprisingly interesting like weird
little tidbits of Internet history like
this

if you know of anything like this

doesn't have to be related to emoticons
or language or anything like that

if it
that's great but it doesn't have to be
that

but anything that's kind of just
like a weird tidbit of Internet history
like this

tell me your suggestions I
will be reading the comments

thank you
so much for watching and I will see you
in another video next week

music