My Sides

About

“My Sides” is a colloquial phrase used to convey laughter on message boards or in comments, especially in response to a funny image, video or remark made by someone else. This expression, which implies that the speaker has laughed so hard to the extent that his or her diaphragm is in pain, can also be used in conjunction with LOL and interchangeably with “What is Air?,” a similar phrase indicating that one has laughed so hard that the speaker lost his or her breath.

Origin

As early as 1996, the phrase “laughing ’til my sides hurt” (LTMSH) was included on a list of internet acronyms.^[1] By October 27th, 2000, “my sides” had begun to appear in comments to express how hard someone laughed at a post, as seen in the comments section of a blog post listing 50 ways to get kicked out of a mall (shown below).^[2]

Spread

Throughout the early 2000s, the phrase appeared on Usenet newsgroups^[3] and a number of message boards including counterculture forum Bombshock^[4], Tolkien fan forum Council of Elrond^[5], the Jehovahs Witness forums^[6] and gaming forum Terra Arcanum.^[7] As early as February 2008, the phrase was used on a number of boards throughout 4chan.^[8] In 2011, the phrase began appearing on the CNET forums.^[9] In October 2012, “my sides” was first defined on Urban Dictionary^[10] (shown below) and a Facebook fan page^[11]titled “Oh My Sides” was launched to curate humorous image macros.

Throughout 2012 and early 2013, “my sides” was mentioned on several online gaming discussion forums including the League of Legends community^[12], UO Gamers^[13] and Hydrocity Gaming,^[14] while also being used as a caption or title for humorous content on 9gag^[15], Imgur^[16] and FunnyJunk.^[17] On Tumblr, the phrases “my sides”^[18] and “oh god my sides”^[19] are often used as tag keywords on humorous posts.

Notable Examples

My Sides Are In Orbit

“My Sides are In Orbit” is an derivative version of the phrase used to note an extreme or intense response to something funny. It began appearing as early as August 2012 on 4chan, with its earliest archived use in response to a now-deleted YouTube video on /sp/^[20] (Sports, shown below) on August 28th. The phrase continued to be used on other 4chan boards throughout late 2012 including /fit/^[21] (Fitness), /mlp/^[22] (My Little Pony) and /m/^[23] (Mecha).

By November 2012, the phrase began to appear outside of 4chan, and was used in the comments of FunnyJunk.^[24] That December, the phrase “My Sides Are In Orbit” was used as the title of a thread dedicated to humorous videos on the OTRepository^[26] forums. It began appearing on Reddit^[26] by February 2013, where it has been used more than 500 times as of September 2013.^[27] In June 2013, a Yahoo! Answers^[28] user asked for a explanation of the phrase, where the top comment defined it as violent laughter that results in “the sides (ribs, etc.) reach[ing] escape velocity and achiev[ing] orbit.” “My sides are in orbit” is also a popular tag on Tumblr^[29] as commentary on humorous posts.