Say what you want about textspeak, but, the proverbial bastard child spawned from that fateful one-night-stand between the English Language and the Internet in the mid-2000s– played a major role in streamlining conversation.
Looking back at our texting habits in the late aughts - it's cringe-y thinking about it. But back then it was all the rage. And why wouldn't it be? Textspeak was basically a medium that conveyed thought, body language, and pitch through a screen using a minimalist combination of strategically placed characters, substitutive letters, and numerals. From capitalization to suggest emphasis, to asterisk enclosed stage directions indicating supposed physical action-- textspeak rendered actual physical conversation redundant.
But while we hid behind the screen of anonymity, trolling various chat rooms on the internet, the expression of one emotion remained essential, and that was laughter. With the world of funnies just a click away, internet residents came up with a whole assortment of ways to convey laughter online. From the handy LOL- laugh out loud, to a whole variety of other acronyms for laughter, such as LMAO, ROFL, ROFLOL for laughing my ass off and rolling on the floor laughing (out loud), each of which could be capitalized and/or punctuated with an expletive for emphasis.
Fast-forward to ten years later: the rise of the smartphone and autocorrect rendered textspeak extinct. Today, we don't use irrelevant acronyms to save time on keystrokes or substitute numerals for letters anymore-- we don't need to. And when we laugh we prefer typing out each individual ha-ha syllable or using a string of emojis to convey the degree of our laughter. But in the midst of this communication evolution, one universal remnant of textspeak has endured, namely, “LOL”.
This nuanced expression has indeed slipped into our mainstream phraseology. But the once universal symbol for the funnies has long since abandoned the lexicon for laughter, sailing through the steady current of a semantic shift over time.
The term LOL is what linguistics call a “pragmatic particle," like your typical colloquialisms such as “um” or “like” which basically have no semantic meaning, and are just taken to be indicative of informal speech or lack of eloquence. No longer is the meaning of LOL so clear-cut as standing for Laugh Out Loud, and not as we had to keep reminding our mothers, not Lots of Love.
At the height of Yahoo Messenger and Orkut, the ever-popular LOL was our go-to response for anything and everything remotely entertaining. Of course, taking a LOL at face value would suggest someone bordering on hysteria. And even then, when we sent those three little characters out into the void, we weren't actually laughing out loud as suggested. As a universal symbol of laughter, however, the term LOL seemed apt.
The intricacies of this seemingly neutral word, today, has become so layered, that it's meaning is now completely ambiguous-- the once jolly marker of supposed laughter has evolved into the jack-of-all-trades equivalent of expressing sentiment, hosting a flexible range of uses.
LOL is now used as a social buffer, a term whose varied meanings are mutually acknowledged and understood by frequent texters. You could preface a statement with LOL to flag it as one that is supposed to be funny, or casually drop a LOL at the end of a text to signal irony. A strategically placed LOL is sometimes used as a discourse marker to soften the tone of a particular statement and at other times as a dismissive and condescending expression. Today it’s not surprising when LOL is used in verbal conversation.
Whether you're an unashamed LOL abuser or not, the kind of language that is being created online has been weaselling its way into everyday use for years and affecting day-to-day speech patterns, and, thusly, deserves much speculation—even to the point of overthinking.
In defence of millennials everywhere accused of the bastardization of the English Language with our texting shorthand, I just want to say it's the opposite. By coming up with increasingly creative ways to express tone and emphasis when facial cues are not an option is enough proof that we are, in fact, revolutionizing the English Language.
