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.
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.
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.
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 2000s
Cell 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.
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 2000s
Cell 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