“OMG! LOL’s in the OED. LMAO!”
If you find the above string of letters utterly unintelligible, you are clearly an internet “noob”. Let me start again.
Golly gosh! The popular initialism LOL has been inducted into the canon of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. Blimey! What is going on?
The OED defines LOL as an interjection “used chiefly in electronic communications… to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement or to express amusement”.
It is both “LOL” where all the letters are pronounced separately, but also commonly “lol” where it is pronounced as a word.
The phrase was ushered in alongside OMG (Oh My God), with dictionary guardians pointing to their growing occurrence “in e-mails, texts, social networking. . .and even in spoken use”.
As well as school playgrounds, words like “lolz” and “lolling” can be heard in pubs and offices — though often sarcastically, or in parody.
Love it or loathe it, “lol” is now a legitimate word in our lexicon, says Graeme Diamond, the OED’s principal editor for new words.
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“The word is common, widespread, and people understand it,” he explains.
The word serves a real purpose — it conveys tone in text, something that even the most cynical critics accept.
“I don’t ‘LOL’. I’m basically someone who kind of hates it,” says Rob Manuel of the internet humour site b3ta.
“But the truth is, we do need emotional signifiers in tweets and emails, just as conversation has laughter. ‘LOL’ might make me look like a twit, but at least you know when I’m being arch.”
But no matter how much irony we cake it in, the L-word grinds the ears of many people over the age of 25.
“The death of the dictionary” is how one blogger greeted its induction to the bastion of English.
While on Facebook, there are at least half a dozen “anti-LOL” groups, where lol-ophobes dream of loll-ageddon:
“If something is funny, ‘ha’, ‘hehehehe’, or ‘hee hee’ is perfectly fine depending on the joke, and more descriptive than ‘lol’,” writes one hater.
Another complains that lol “doesn’t sound anything like laughter. In fact you physically CAN’T say it while smiling. I’m all for bastardisation of the language, but with lol, that thing you thought was rubbish, really is rubbish”.
Wags point out that “LOL” is almost always disingenuous. “How many people are actually laughing out loud when they say LOL?” asks David Crystal, author of Language and the Internet.
But those laughing least of all are the language purists, who lament “LOL” as a hallmark of creeping illiteracy. — BBC News
