X: Hey, whats up?
Y: Nothing much, just woke up, lol
X: Oh just now? hey I heard your car broke down last night. Everything okay?
Y: Yeah, sure lol. Nothing happened. I took a bus back home lol, no big deal
X: Did you parents scold you?
Y: Parents? No, lolxx. I live with my wife. She tried to kick me out of the house lol. In front of my kids. lol
X: Wife? Just the other day you were getting scolded. Who was that?
Y: Lol, that was my wife. lol. I am starving
X: Dude, then go eat
Y: Lol. I didn’t think of that. Arright, catch you later LOL, bye.
Needless to say, I want to kill this Y person.
You see, I have disliked the term (I refuse to call it word) ‘lol’ since the first time I came across it back when chat rooms and mIRC was the thing. Alright, no, I chose the wrong verb. I do not dislike it. I hate it. I abhor it. If it had physical existence, I would squeeze the life out of it. I am doing it mentally right now as I write this blog.
Over time, new slangs were discovered and coined, various different derivatives or shall I say extropolations of lol materialized but lol never ’lolled out’ of fashion. You must have heard of:
rofl: roll of the floor laughing, lmao: laugh my ass off, rotflmao: roll of the floor laughing my ass off . Then there is lm(insert swear word here)ao and so on, you get the picture. All these are annoying granted, but lol really takes the cake. And its not like people are actually laughing out loud. ’Lol’ is so commonly used, it has become the standard response to something you have no reponse to, or something you don’t even find remotely amusing or funny, or something you find sarcastic, or something you are rolling your eyes at… Some people say they like the all-encompassing characteristic of lol. If nothing occurs to you, use lol, if you want to be vague, use lol, if you are bored, use lol… but then the real question is, how can you possibly feel comfortable using a word which has no definite meaning. No, thats not the real question. The real question is, how can you possibly feel comfortable using a word that goes ‘lol’. Just the sound of it makes me cringe. And yes, I know it is not used in verbal conversations but the sound is still there, rolling on your tongue almost like a bad taste in the mouth and it is just plain gross? intolerable? despicable? Trust me, calling it names is almost cathartic to me. I really cannot explain to you how much I hate it.
And anyway, why use ‘lol’ when you can use a good ol’ hearty ‘haha’? What is this sudden need to express everything you ever feel in one word which essentially does not even mean anything? Are you laughing out loud or rolling your eyes, one never knows. They say it is used for brevity’s sake, like shortened words -oh but that is another story altogether and I shall write about that too because I happen to have a very strong opinion on that- you want brevity? I’ll give you brevity. Make that hahahahaha to haha. See?
Nevertheless, underneath this illogical hatred, there is ofcourse a valid reason to get panicked. Oxford Dictonary declaring it a word, for instance. Thats right, folks! It has been written down in history as a legitmate word. It is not only panicking, it is scary; the internet slang language is infiltrating the written and read english language and we are sitting here fueling it.
Alas, here I am writing about how criminal a sin it is to deliberately deteriorate murder the language like this and all around the world, it is being typed out unapolgetically, over and over and over again in different forms (lol, lolz, looolz, loooolzz, lolxx, lolzzzz), fonts, sizes and shapes.
Yes maybe somewhere in the world, another word like lol is also being envisioned as we speak. (Ever heard of TWF) But I do not see Lol disappearing anywhere the way Blimey and Golly did. (Don’t they sound like twin-sister characters from Enid Blyton?)
And incase you are wondering, TWF means ‘that was funny’. Lol.
Related articles
- What ‘lol’ doesn’t mean – but could (guardian.co.uk)
