I asked Veronica how to pronounce LOL. She is of an age to know, for this abbreviation is ubiquitous in emails and texts. ‘El-o-el,’ she said. So, orally it isn’t much of an abbreviation, though it performs better than www, which replaces three syllables, world wide web, with nine syllables. Next week LOL joins other initialisms in the big fat Oxford English Dictionary. An initialism is more specific than an abbreviation. Abbreviations include pleasantly obsolescent terms like affly for affectionately. If you read affly aloud, you would say ‘affectionately’, unless you were using oral inverted commas, intending to convey its air of archaism. If you read out a true acronym like Nato, you would say ‘Nato’.
I asked Veronica how to pronounce LOL. She is of an age to know, for this abbreviation is ubiquitous in emails and texts. ‘El-o-el,’ she said. So, orally it isn’t much of an abbreviation, though it performs better than www, which replaces three syllables, world wide web, with nine syllables. Next week LOL joins other initialisms in the big fat Oxford English Dictionary. An initialism is more specific than an abbreviation. Abbreviations include pleasantly obsolescent terms like affly for affectionately. If you read affly aloud, you would say ‘affectionately’, unless you were using oral inverted commas, intending to convey its air of archaism. If you read out a true acronym like Nato, you would say ‘Nato’.
LOL seldom is said out loud, for it belongs to the written world of instant messaging. Probably it would be read as ‘laugh out loud’, or ‘laughing out loud’ as the OED prefers. (Oddly, though, a recent modern dance performed at Chichester, Islington, and other places where they tolerate modern dance, is called LOL, meaning ‘lots of love’.)
LOL is in a strange category, halfway to an emoticon. As the sensible linguistician David Crystal asks: ‘How many people are actually “laughing out loud” when they send LOL?’ It is a sort of meta-language, a running commentary or stage direction, like putting ‘Geddit?’ in brackets after a remark. A perversely irregular plural of LOL has arisen: LULZ or lulz. This has acquired the simple meaning ‘laughs’, but can be used to label anything of interest. It can also be used ironically of the (juvenile) online motives of people likely to say: ‘I did it for the lulz.’ As someone remarks on Urban Dictionary (an online wiki-like resource): ‘Lulz is the one good reason to do anything, from trolling to rape.’ By trolling, is meant disrupting online messageboards by posting provoking or erroneous information.
LOL has long been included in the single-volume Oxford Dictionary of English (Ode). It is coming to the OED now because it is widespread and established. The OED, not susceptible to trolling, won’t respond to ephemera such as lulz until they show staying power. For my part, I can’t imagine using even LOL without irony. But irony is cool.
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