Stop Using “Lol”
    âYo you tryna get something to eat after college tomorrow Lol?â was the text I got from my friend this morning. Donât ask me why he put the âLolâ after his sentence. Like there is nothing remotely funny about what he said. Who laughs out loud after asking someone if they wanna go eat? It might sound absurd but many people write Lol after a sentence that isnât funny in any way. When we get so used to a word and use it repeatedly, we donât even start to use it for its actual meaning but rather we use it for no reason at all.
    As we all know, âLolâ is an acronym for âlaugh out loudâ. According to the article âLOL, WTF? The Origin Stories Of Your Favorite Internet Acronymsâ, published by The Huffington Post, âThe online use of LOL might date back as far as the early â80s in Calgary, Canada, when then-student Wayne Pearson coined the term with friends on Viewline, a bulletin board system that was a sort of rudimentary chatroom. Or so he claimsâ(Rebecca Hiscott, 2). So basically a student was trying to be funny in an online chatroom and ended up creating the famous acronym we all know today. Back then, people definitely laughed out loud after using Lol because it was a newly introduced word with only one meaning behind it. But nowadays, about 38 years later, itâs a different story. Stuart Heritage, an author for âThe Guardianâ states,  âA world without Lol is a world without laughter, or at least a world without people claiming to laugh when theyâre really just sitting there silently typing things onto Facebook with a Jaffa Cake hanging out of their mouthâ(Stuart Heritage, 1). What Stuart is saying here is that when someone says Lol, you would imagine them to be sitting on facebook or any other social media silently without a care in the world for what you said.
    Well that kinda pisses me off. Imagine sending one of your friends a joke that you put a lot of thought into and they respond with a simple âLolâ. How would that make you feel? I for sure would want a better reaction. Well I canât be too mad because honestly, I do the same thing. In my case, If someone sends me something that they think is funny, but I donât, Iâll respond with a Lol. This leads to another thought: saying Lol nowadays is implying that you arenât showing enough interest to what is being asked or told to you, which is kinda ironic if you ask me. Yeah I may be overthinking it but I donât care because I feel smart at the moment. Anyways, I feel like the increased use of other acronyms such as âLmaoâ or âLmfaoâ is the main cause for the change in the meaning of Lol. We all know that Lmao and Lmfao mean: âlaughing my ass offâ but one has a fuck in it, which in a way shows more reaction. So letâs get back to the example I provided earlier. You text your friend a joke that you put quite a bit of thought into and he or she responds with an Lmao or Lmfao. I would be much more satisfied with that response than a simple âLolâ because it isnât that basic.
    Is Lol actually used for what it stands for today? Thatâs an interesting question because it has been up for discussion for a long time now. Back in 2006, David Crystal, author of âLanguage and the Internetâ, asked his readers âHow many people are actually âlaughing out loudâ when they send Lol?â(David Crystal, 26). Not many, I would imagine. Lol is basically used nowadays to show the fact that you have read a message and acknowledged it. You can also use it to sort of balance out a slightly offensive statement that you made and turn it into a joke. For example, you text your friend, âDoes your fatass want to get something to eat Lol?â The Lol there takes emphasis off the âfatassâ and lets the person know that youâre just joking. Now read that text without the Lol. It seems a lot more offensive because it doesnât have that playful and light tone that lol provides. Itâs crazy because Lol can even be used to quickly end a text conversation. Think about it, what can you possibly respond to Lol with? It basically gives off the impression that the person is boring and isnât interested in talking with me. Personally I made it a rule for myself to cut off any communication with a person that sends me an Lol without any context. Yes I take it that serious.
    So why do I want you to stop using âLolâ? Well, mainly because it causes confusion and itâs way too overused. Funny enough, this is what the Urban Dictionary says about Lol: âNow, it is overused to the point where nobody laughs out loud when they say it. In fact, they probably donât even give a shit about what you just wrote. More accurately, the acronym âLolâ should be redefined as âLack of laughter.â (âLolâ). I cannot agree with this statement enough. The word has been so overused to a point that itâs definition has been altered into many other meanings thus causing confusion. Everyone has their own meaning for the word today and itâs hard to decipher what the other person is trying to say when they use it. Donât get me wrong, there might be people that still use Lol for itâs actual meaning but that would be very obsolete and uncommon.
    At the end of the day, we can express ourselves however we want. But life would be much better if we took âLolâ out of the equation. I mean there are so many other acronyms (with more emotion to them) around to use. For example, Smh(Shaking my head), Lmao(Laughing my ass off), ILY(I love you), Wtf(What the fuck) and Omg(Oh my god). For Godâs sake you can even use emojis. Nowadays thereâs something called a laughing emoji that clearly depicts laughter unlike a very special acronym we know today. At least you can tell that thereâs some type of reaction and not just a mindless âLolâ when you use emojis.
Bibliography:
â Heritage, Stuart. â25 Years of LOL â the Good and Bad Bits.â The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 May 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/28/25-years-lol-good-bad-bits.
â Hiscott, Rebecca. âLOL, WTF? The Origin Stories Of Your Favorite Internet Acronyms.â The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/17/internet-acronyms_n_5585425.html.
â âLol.â Urban Dictionary, www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lol.
â Pittsburgh, Lauren Collister University of. âThe Surprisingly Long, Unfunny History of âLOLâ.â The Washington Post, WP Company, 28 May 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/05/28/the-surprisingly-long-and-unfunny-history-of-lol/?utm_term=.09bdfc1ba0e0.
– Crystal, David. Language and the Internet. 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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