I saw a YouTube video comment the other night that said "I was LOLing the whole time" and it troubled me. If LOL is an acronym for Laugh Out Loud, shouldn't it have been LingOL? This got me to thinking about other ways that LOL is used. Like, have y'all ever seem the video with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake making fun of hashtags? When Justin says "LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL." That doesn't make sense, bro. Laugh out loud out loud out loud out loud out loud..........but we still get that it means laughing a lot instead of just a normal amount. I have never been a fan of "LOL," which is kind of funny since I distinctly remember a time when my oldest brother, Tim, was going to college and we used to e-mail each other back and forth making up giant acronyms to replace sentences. I think it all started with me using TTYL and then it just grew from there, like TTYLLMTOMINS (talk to you later, like maybe tomorrow or Monday, I'm not sure). Good times. Anyways, my point is, I'm not hater of acronyms, but for some reason I've just never really used lol. I prefer to use "Haha!" or "Jaja!" (depending on which language I'm using....but let's be real, I switch them up on accident all the time). Here's why I think "Haha!" is better than "LOL:"
Haha is kind of actually how people laugh, which means if something is really funny you could say Hahahahahahahahahaha! And it totes makes sense. If you're just making a point or declaring victory over someone, you can just us "Ha!" Like, "Hey, I looked up the stats on that 1998 world cup game and I was right, there were 3 red cards and 6 yellows given out, not 4 reds and 8 yellows. Ha!" Haha also works in other languages (as I've already briefly mentioned). Since it's written like a laugh, of course it is "multilingual." On the flipside, I've seen people text "lol" when writing in Spanish, but I've also had students ask me what it means and why their friends keep using it. So if you, like me, dream of one day using a plethora of languages to express yourself, perhaps lol isn't your best bet.
All of that is really just to say that I think it's really interesting to see how certain acronyms have worked their way into our word banks as words in and of themselves. Like how LOL becomes LOLing, or LOLed. PIN (Personal Identification Number) is often referred to as PIN number, same with VIN (Vehicle Identification Number). ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) has become ATM machine.
This was probably the nerdiest blog I've ever posted.
