“LOL” and Other Insults to the English Language
I fucking hate acronyms. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I write, so I love our language, I love what we can achieve with just twenty-six letters, but I also despise what some people do with those letters. LOL.
See what I did there?
LOL is the most overused acronym ever. In the world.
My mum, when I was younger, thought it meant “lots of love” and, to be honest, that would have been better than “laugh out loud.” I have an issue with this one. It pisses me off. Yes I said it out loud, only I didn’t, because I am typing here, not speaking. Therein lies problem.
Someone messages me, I respond, and they type back “LOL.”
Why? Did you really laugh out loud? Because I didn’t hear you, and what I said wasn’t even fucking funny.
Let’s move on.
Before broadband, when dial-up still existed, I spent many nights clogging up the phone line on MSN Messenger. I remember it vividly.
I often wonder if it was the dawn of the Internet and instant messaging applications that caused this shorthand slang to rise and kill off legitimate conversations.
“BRB” was the first acronym I shamefully used as a teen. I guess peer pressure played its part and, at that point in my life, I wasn’t interested in words like I am now. I was more interested in boys.
BRB was the most frustrating thing to see popping up in the chat window.
BRB, or be right back, usually meant that the other person couldn’t be bothered to talk to you. They’d turn off their visibility and talk to someone else.
By the time Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, et al were born, I was an adult, paving my way into a career in social media management and marketing, along with writing for my own pleasure, and amusement at times.
I watched character limits become the norm, and text messages become a mirror image of the poor communication and spelling in society.
By this time, I understood the gravity of the written word. I also understood how to use words properly to portray a message with the right potency.
This cannot be done using “text talk”, acronym or slang. There are, still to this day, adults I know using this “trend-failing” shorthand to communicate with others, and it kills me. It’s good to talk. Even BT said so in one of its biggest marketing campaigns ever.
It’s lovely to be able to converse with someone through free flowing words, whether spoken or pixelated, until I see these — PMSL, LMAO, ROFLMAO, ROFL. You get the gist.
I’m going to give you a real quick run down on my take of the above with a few added extras.
PMSL — Are you really “pissing yourself laughing?” Unless you have a problem with incontinence or your pelvic floor is shit, the answer is no, probably not.
LMAO — Is this even possible, realistically, medically? Can you actually laugh your arse (ass) off?
ROFL — I always wonder of the logistics of this one.
I’m not badly coordinated, but I doubt I could really “roll on the floor laughing” whilst messaging someone.
ROFLMAO — Medically, and logistically this is extremely improbable. Read ROFL & LMAO. I need not say more.
IMO / IMHO — “In my opinion” you have to be intelligent enough to have an opinion, and if you’re intelligent, you wont use IMO or IMHO.
FML — I have often thought this one, but seriously, to type “fuck my life”, it only takes 10 characters of your time, is it worth the shorthand? No. Fuck my life is way more potent than FML.
TTYL / TGIF / TFIF — These three are old hat, downright snooze-worthy. No point in wasting any more pixels here.
Now that’s out of the way, let me just say this. I am 28 years young / old, and there are new acronyms I come across every single day, ones I have to Google, regularly. I’ll be damned if I’ll ever use any of them, yet, when your job ensures you spend a lot of time on social media, you engage with people who talk this way all the time.
Not knowing what SMH means or FTW for that matter makes me feel uncool, and like a grandma.
But, I am not the uncool one; I think it’s insanely cool (and hot too) to be eloquent and good with words. (read: not using text slang).
To conclude, without using any acronyms whatsoever, if you are communicating with someone, don’t cut corners, don’t shorten your words. We have 26 letters at our disposal and an unthinkable amount of ways to use them. Don’t cheapen our beautiful language with an acronym. Listen to your sentences, enjoy the words.
Originally published at blog.theprose.com on June 18, 2015.
