First of all, I need to clarify something rather peculiar here. Does anyone here have not used the famous ‘lol’ in real life? I know that the absence of a Facebook account is acceptable for the perfect gentlemen but not using the word ‘lol’? I find it abnormal nowadays unless you’re one of the baby boomers and probably among the Generation X.
I typed several ‘lol’s in a day and thought of writing some explanatory facts about it. While reading the Wikipedia I found a reasonable amount of facts about it. Believe it or not, ‘lol’ has a few more siblings. Here’s a list of it:
LOL – Laugh out loud.
LMAO – Laughing my ass off.
ROFLMAO – Rolling on floor laughing my ass off.
As I mentioned earlier, baby boomers may have difficulties of deciphering this annotations. Well the other two acronyms are longer by adding a few more words into the sentence. LMAO and ROFLMAO put a more aggressive descriptive value to the acronyms. Adding ‘my ass off’ really kicks of hard to the meaning, and bringing means of annotating text with some stage directions to the latter.
As other acronyms, these actually evolved to language and used in verbal communication despite its computer-mediated communication origin. Some say it is a “brand new language varieties” and some stated the obvious which is, “it just shorten the long sentences and not ‘enrich’ it”. Take a look at these few examples:
ROFL (pronounced /ˈroʊfəl/ or /ˈrɒfəl/)
LOL (pronounced /ˈloʊl/, /ˈlɒl/, or /ˌɛloʊˈɛl/)
I say, it does enrich it if you say ‘Lawl’ with a capital L (You can type the word ‘Lol’ in your mind right about now). We write and we express but to the point of annotations with stage directions bring acronyms to the next level. It does look awesome. But do you exactly done it with the level of expressing the laughter to the floor and laughing it out loud when writing it? I bet all of us just give a small smirk and just a corner smile. Am I right?
How cool the laughing acronyms is, it do make you look stupid and the boss might ‘lol’ at you too if included in reports. There are more acronyms to share but I will not get to them now.
And for those who read this post and still feel utterly enlightened from it, that is a subtle irony indeed.