To be clear: These are not your father's tildes, or rather, the tildes your father used to access a personal website on a Unix-based server. (Those would be the tildes behind tilde.club, the writer Paul Ford's "nerd party" retro-web community. When I asked Ford where he thought the bracketing tildes came from, he wrote back, enigmatically, "It's very Californian originally. I don't know actually where it came from.") Nor are these the tildes you may have used to make your AIM or Myspace screen name look ~~~extra snazzy~~~, nor are they the tildes used on message boards and forums to broadly signify good vibes: ~~~~~~~~~