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@1. ^W == ctrl-W == delete-last-word on terminals. Old geek joke. There's also ^H for delete-last-character (i.e. b^Hromance). I learned that if you say too many positive things about someone, it is possible to be misconstrued as mocking >_< Nevertheless, stay awesome, lil.
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user-inactivated · 3376 days ago · link ·
At the risk of over-explaining the joke, a common misconfiguration on old dumb terminals would result in the ^W/^H not actually deleting the previous word/character, but rather inserting literal ^W/^H characters. The terminal itself would interpret them correctly, so it would appear to the user that they had deleted what they meant to delete. This had amusing results when people thought of a more tactful way to phrase something in an email.