How often have you lately been sent the cryptic ‘TL;DR’? I had no clue what it meant when I first saw it myself. ‘TL;DR’ means ‘too long; didn’t read,’ and it functions in a variety of ways, whether apologetic (sorry, I didn’t have the time to read the long piece you sent me), to accusatory (I asked you a question but what you sent was too long to read). But it’s also increasingly being used to mean ‘the gist’ or ‘the summary’ of a long and complex idea, as in ‘the TL;DR of this is’, followed by a short explanation: ‘the TL;DR of this is that global warming is real’. And it even serves as an
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