English? No, I speak American.

You've been around the interwebz long enough to know the lingo--uber l337; hax0r; stylish misspellings and the occasional z at the end of a word. (Okay, so that's mostly just leetspeak, but you get my point. Nerd.)

During a recent Facebook conversation about a certain picture involving myself and three other friends of the male persuasion wearing rather fetching shades of nail polish, I casually dropped another piece of internet jargon. I commented that the photo was "made of win," and a friend asked me what it meant.

I responded with the following explanation:


A picture/joke/sandwich/whatever is going to have a certain amount of coolness to it. If the picture is of your cat taking a poo, then the coolness level is likely to be very low (or negative); if the picture is of Ben [friend's brother] doing a kick flip through a ring of fire off the top of the Sears Tower, then the coolness level is likely to be very high.

Now, if you were to compare that same picture with a picture of oh, say, me reciting the entire Canadian national anthem backwards . . . in French . . . then the coolness level of the two pictures would be compared, and Ben's would come out on top. Or "win," as it were. (Because all you'd see in my picture is me standing there with my mouth open, because you can't hear a picture.)

Thus, when a person says "That is made of win," he is saying that not only does it beat out anything that might be compared to it, but that it is so awesome that its very makeup is constituted of that quality of "win"--it's like awesome incarnate.

In fact, the phrase is sometimes substituted with "That is made of awesome," or, "There is so much epic in that picture that if it went to the bathroom, it would use Homer's 'The Odyssey' as toilet paper." All of these mean the same thing: incontrovertibly awesome and intense, like a giant fist made of million-dollar bills punching you in the eye.


So there you have it, for all of you inquiring minds out there.

May Noah Webster forgive us all.