Pages

Friday, November 03, 2006

The LOL files

Is it just me, or has LOL usage come to the point of no return? It almost seems now that when someone responds to an email or text message with just "LOL" as the response, that they are mocking the sender.

Used to be that an LOL-only response made you feel good inside, like you had actually made the other person laugh out loud. But things have changed.

(One quick note on the history of LOL - apparently it was invented to ease the burden of typing a longer response over the internet. How painful is it really to type all 15 letters in "laughing out loud"?? I mean, I type around 4th grader speed, and it only takes me about 20 seconds to type the whole phrase out. You would have thought that in the days of the quill pen and ink-dipping that scribes would have invented LOL. Strange, I know.)

In fact, I know of two instances in the past month where I received a semi-unwanted text message that was meant to be funny. In both cases, I didn't find either of them funny or deserving of any mental effort on my part before sending a response to indicate that I didn't think it was as funny as the sender obviously did... my response in both cases was solely "LOL".

And what I meant by "LOL" was "Nice try. You may have thought that was funny, but my highly advanced sense of humor does not agree. Please don't waste my cyber-space with un-funny rubbish like that again. Make sure it's funny next time."

Is anyone out there still using LOL to say that they actually laughed out loud?

3 comments:

Marc said...

LOL is a disappointing response. I'm not satisfied unless I get a full-fledged ROTFL or LMAO or the crowning jewel of all internet responses, the grand-daddy himself, the LMFAO.

Sidenote: LOL is much easier to type than laughing out loud and much easier to justify than other commonplace abbreviations (see e.g., "O.K." for "Okay" or "Jack" for "John").

smootheP said...

Isn't it weird to hear people say "LOL" in spoken conversation?

The crowning jewel of spoken internet responses would have to be one that I brought into actual dialogue about 4 years ago... WTF. (I'm sure I wasn't alone in bringing it to real conversation, there are many geniuses like me out there...;)

Anonymous said...

I've always hated LOL. Mostly because I think it was invented by 14 year old girls and also because I don't know anyone who actually laughed out loud and then wrote it. LOL makes little girls and liars of all who use it.