Go fuck yourself, lol.
About to, lol.
Tone is an absolute bitch to convey properly over text, if you don’t add indicators it’s up to the reader to determine the tone you’re using. Miscommunication causes larger problems. Using lol helps indicate a lighter tone so people don’t think I’m pissed off or grumpy when I’m not
yeah, I mean that’s why emojis exist in the first place.
We use a form of speech from before emojis (:
Good ol’ smileys! :D
And somewhere inbetween, or perhaps alongside the smileys, we had the wonders of kaomoji
(◕‿◕✿)
Hell yeah. :D
Millennials didn’t have emojis at first. You realize that, right?
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Regular text emojis have been around forever. I was talking about those.
Emoticons, please
Potato, potato :)
But consider:
Emojis have no soul, and will never see the light of Heaven
Text based emoticons, meanwhile :) :( :3 :o Are God’s chosen tone indicator, animated with the breath of life
I had to teach myself to say lol all the time via text and it absolutely helps with tone, so does using emoji which was something else I had to force myself to do. I seem less mature I guess but I don’t come off as a blunt asshole anymore and my conversations go a lot smoother
I’m afraid I’ve used “lol” so much for so many years that this is exactly how people will interpret my texts if I suddenly stop now.
U ok? Did we upset you? You seem…tense.
I too am not sure how to interpret your message lol
I have been called weird or passive aggressive for using punctuation in my text messages. Why do we cater to these people? Why do I care about the opinion of someone who takes to heart whether I use an exclamation point or period at the end of a sentence? It should have been their problem to learn to not make assumptions.
Because you’re not following social conventions
It’s also up to you to learn to work with others, conversation is a cooperative game. If you don’t give enough signs, people don’t know the tone you are intending to give over text, because body language and verbal tone is missing. That’s the purpose of the informal conventions
It’s your problem to learn too
I perceive lol as slightly unserious / childish, but maybe it’s because I’m GenX
I’m a Xennial? Born in 1980 so last year of Gen X, first year of Millennials?
I learned back in the early '90s that “lol” made my lighthearted comments appear lighthearted, and not cynical.
Life is meaningless and the universe is cruel chaos lol
Damn, it really works.
I feel this in my bones.
Scorpy’s gonna scorp. XD
rofl
It masks all the sadness in my heart, lol.
I’m sorry for your loss, move on, lol
Lots of love?
Life sucks, I’m poor, and everything hurts. Lol.
I’m Gen Z and I use lol as punctuation at the end of a sentence to indicate a lighthearted tone, just like a ? or ! indicate their respective tones. It’s very useful, and I think I’ll keep using it lol
It fills a similar niche to tone tags but somewhat less intrusive imo.
This has how it’s always been used as far as I have seen as an older millennial, aside from being used in a form of irony.
It’s an upbeat tone indicator. But it’s not the same as sending someone a smile with your text.
It fills a useful niche. Just like /s also does.
But I really am laughing out loud. I am rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off. In a helicopter. A helicopter that goes swooshswooshswooshdwoosh.
Not aware of this helicopter stuff. What is that about? Lol?
Ah yes the roflcopter
And also don’t forget the dongcopter
ROFLcopter or Rolling on the floor laughing like a helicopter is when something is so funny that you fall out of your seat laughing and you start kicking yourself giddily around the floor in a circle like a helicopter rotor.
You can pry my lol from my cold dead fingers lol
Lmao, even
Can’t stop won’t stop lol.
I have a tendency to speak very blunt and directly about most things, so lol is absolute necessity for me online in order to not blatantly spread ragebait everywhere I go lol
I’m gen X as all hell and I’ll say lol when I want lol.
I say lol for teh lulz.
I was once sitting next to a colleague in a group pod who sent us an e-mail ending with “lol”. I turned to my left and called him out on it because that dude was quiet as a mouse.
Millennials not using lol in their messages is like a Brit not offering you tea
Yeah it’s a tone indicator “this may be taken as having a serious or upset tone, but wasn’t meant that way” though it also can mean “please don’t be upset” in the case of something like “sorry I disappeared for a bit, life happened lol”
Elder (and just old) millennial here. I remember “lol” became a thing because cell phones became a common thing. Specifically, the old flip phones.
Texting on them was a pain. Imagine having to type words with only a number pad. And you only had a tiny digital screen that could only fit a few words on it. On top of that, we were sometimes charged by the character. Or sometimes by the word. Depended on your service.
Everyone was looking for the shortest way to type words and get their message across. So shortcuts like “lol,” “ily,” “wdym,” etc. became common use. As well as a variety of text emojis like :) :D :P or the fancy Japanese ones: (^_^) (-_-;;) etc.
As someone who spent their childhood with their nose buried in books, it bothered me to see this shorthand English everywhere. It just felt lazy to me. To this day, I’ve never typed “lol” unless I’m talking about the acronym itself.
I’d say they were already very common in online chatrooms long before cellphones were widely adopted. They just translated really well to the poor typing options, character limits, and per-message billing of the time so became more widely adopted (and some new shorthand created).
Before us millenials had our own take at inventing initialisms and proto emojis…
Beepers. Pagers.
A fair number of different kinds of ‘codes’ became at least somewhat widely used as shorthand for more semantically complex things, and they had even smaller character limits.
https://www.wikihow.com/Pager-Codes
Now I was like 5 when pagers were all the rage, so I have no personal experience with these, but this was arguably the gen x version of millenials who spent too much time on computers as children coming up with ‘gtfo’ and ‘lmao’ and ‘rofl’ and such.
Excellent point! That pushes the timeline back even further.
GenX here. Yeah I remember beepers being all the rage in a brief window of time, just before cell phones took off. They were called “Minicall” here in Sweden.
Huh! It never occurred to me that there would be other funny/cute nicknames for them in other languages, but… duh, obviously, of course there would be.
Neat!
Yeah. It could be that it was an actual brand name, but everyone called them that in any case.
Sorta like how ~1/3 of Americans refer to any kind of soda / pop as ‘Coke’.
Hold up.
I think that mobile phones became popular before chat rooms.
Chat rooms existed first, but I think that they were mostly just for nerds until the early to mid 2000sCell phones were only for grown ups and maybe rich kids, but anyone could install instant messaging software on the family computer.
Everyone I knew in high school, even if I wasn’t friends with them, had AIM and even Facebook before all of them had phones, because phones cost money.
Hold up tho. We’re all nerds here, right?
Thank you for explaining this, lol
Similar shorthand was used when sending telegrams, as they were charged by the character too.
lol STOP lmao STOP
