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Why do I use LOL so much in my texts?

Illustration: Guardian Design/Richard Drury/Getty Images

Illustration: Guardian Design/Richard Drury/Getty Images

It’s painful when the internet roasts you – and even worse when it’s right. When a viral post mocked millennials for using LOL like punctuation, I felt personally attacked.

“Millennials use ‘lol’ like STOP at the end of a telegram lol,” wrote @gaulicsmith.

(“Sorry about that lol,” someone responded.)

What could I say? For this millennial, the dig was accurate. My personal texts and work chats are littered with LOLs. It’s not enough to say I forgot about something – instead, it’s “I forgot lol.” I’m not just on a shopping break – “I’m banned from buying clothes until 2026 lol”.

Action was required. I decided to stop saying LOL for a week; I had been thinking about quitting anyway.

I’m not an early adopter; I wasn’t LOLing in internet relay chat (IRC) channels in 1999 or anything. But honestly, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t LOL. Perhaps I leaned harder on it when I started working in digital media, so I could message my colleagues in an aggressively friendly way that ensured nobody would misconstrue my personality for boring or stern. Really, it’s like a clown tooting a horn: Parp-parp! I’m fun and nice, and nobody could ever be mad at me!

Indeed, my professional communiques were strewn with this conversational confetti. When I floated the idea of quitting, colleagues indicated it was basically part of my personality. “I never used LOL before talking to you all day long,” said my editor. “It’ll be a tough week in Slack … I’ll be convinced I’m flopping,” said a reporter.

To be clear, there’s no judgment here. LOL is useful! Sometimes, you really are LOL. Or maybe you’re injecting levity when reminding someone to take out the trash. But my usage was so high I felt irritated. It was a sloppy tic, both tedious and unserious. I also wondered if it was an emotional crutch. Couldn’t I just say what I think or ask a question without this nervous little addition?

I wanted to keep myself honest. Every time I typed LOL into a text field, it went onto a list. Often, I used it without thinking; twice, I sent a message before catching the LOL and deleting it.

At the end of the week, I’d typed LOL 24 times. A sampling, annotated with the purpose (all lower-case, obviously – don’t forget I’m a millennial):

  • i’d have to go to a store and try on a pair and buy that pair lol (translation: I’m lazy)

  • ok leaving now lol (translation: I’m late)

  • therapy was good, just talking about all my trauma lol (translation: feelings are embarrassing)

  • i’m gonna call the spa and see if i can get a massage lol (translation: no idea about this one)

My colleagues were right. LOL was baked into my communication style.

I don’t consider LOL inherently problematic. Despite the viral post about LOL being millennial-speak, gen Z have adopted it too, and serious complaints about it are no longer common.

Over a decade ago, linguist John McWhorter argued that LOL had morphed from a way to denote that you’re actually laughing into grammar in a 2013 article for CNN.

“No mentally composed human being spends his or her entire life immersed in ceaseless hilarity. The LOLs must mean something else,” he wrote. Instead, it signals an “attitude”, conveying “nuance in a system where you don’t have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would”.

Célia Schneebeli, a linguist, told Vice that LOL can be described as a discourse marker – a word that “helps structure a sentence, or orient fragments of text to context, and past or upcoming sentences”. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber argued in 2016 that it was basically punctuation, “expressing the kind of meta-emotion that is very easy to make clear in in-person conversations and very difficult to make clear in other kinds”.

Source: The Guardian

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