"Lol" denigrates the phenomenon it purports to depict

(Guest post by Zachary Geballe)

I’m writing this with the understanding that it will undoubtedly make me seem like a hopelessly out-of-touch old person, one who can’t believe what those kids are up to these days. That may well be the case, but I’m going to do it anyhow, because I believe fervently that history will judge me to have been in the right all along.

I hate “lol.” It is the worst thing that the Internet has spawned, and I say that only slightly hyperbolically. I hate it not because it’s “chat-speak,” as I use “btw” all the damn time. I hate it because it is a complete and total lie.


Once upon a time, “lol” was an acronym for “laughing out loud.” In the early, Hamster Dance-riddled days of the World Wide Web, it was part of a slew of acronyms that were attempts to convey to the person on the other side of your AIM chat that you had an actual set of human emotions. Since the only information you got out of said chat was text, acronyms, and their red-headed step-children emoticons, such shorthand became a convenient way to express those emotions. Most of them have thankfully died a quiet death, but “lol” remains as a testament to all that is wrong with the Internet.

Let’s get this right out in the open: you are not laughing out loud. Audible laughter is a fairly rare occurrence for most of us, and it’s usually generated by face-to-face interaction. That’s because spontaneous laughter is about more than the actual words, it’s about the full suite of audible and visual cues we get from, you know, talking to someone. Eliciting an actual laugh from someone with just a bit of text is quite the achievement, and deserves more to denote that fact than a hideously-overused acronym.

”Lol” denigrates the phenomenon it purports to depict. By reducing the powerful sensation of being compelled to laugh at something you read into a base acronym, you allow people to misappropriate it. Given the general state of discourse on the Internet, you can guess what’s happened. People type “lol” all the time, and they never mean it. The ratio of not-laughing-out-loud “lol” to genuine out-loud laughs is close to 1,000,000:1.

That’s really the crux of the problem. “Lol” is every-fucking-where, and it means nothing. In the online dating profiles of women in my age bracket. In my 16-year-old sister’s texts to me. In my dad’s texts to me. The only way this could get worse is if they appended one of those insidious hashtags to it. Or Drake wrote a song about it. Shit, I think I just gave him an idea…

***Postscript***

Mere hours after writing this, I received a message on an online dating site from a woman who clearly is not a match for me at all, as she is A) devoutly Christian (I am gleefully hellbound) and B) a mother (I love kids, but I’m not ready to have one in my life). When I responded to her message to politely tell her these things, she responded: “Lol fair enough.” THE MADNESS MUST STOP.

(Image cc-licensed: "LOL Graffiti" by Shawn Carpenter)