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What You Talkin’ ’Bout, Willis?
How I learned to stop hating acronyms and abbreviations and just LOL.
I’ve been laughing out loud most of my life. I probably do it several times a day, sometimes in public and for no apparent reason.
But LOL? I started doing that a little later in life. I probably would have tried it much earlier, if I’d known WTF it meant. (For those still not in the know, it’s “laughing out loud” or “laugh out loud.”) I was introduced to it more than 25 years ago, at the dawn of the email era, back when “You’ve got mail” still meant the postman was at the door. (In this era of text messages and social media, how quaint do movies like You’ve Got Mail and The Postman Always Rings Twice seem?)
My friend Jason and I had been spending a large part of the work day exchanging emails, thoroughly excited about this novel form of remote conversation. It was the first time we’d ever communicated with each other when we weren’t face to face or talking on the phone. Apparently, Jason had discovered a new side of me, the me that comes out in writing but not necessarily in oral conversation. “Until today, I never had any idea that you were so dry and sarcastic,” he wrote shortly before quitting time. “LOL!”
“LOL”? What is that supposed to mean? I wondered. I knew it was some kind of abbreviation or acronym, but AIDS aside, I was never much into using either as a form of shorthand. When words got in the way, they could speed up a written conversation. But were you really saving time if you had to explain what an abbreviation or acronym meant — or if the person on the receiving end of it totally got the wrong idea (as I did… keep reading)?
Over the next week, “LOL” popped up about three times per email from Jason. I figured it must involve “love.” Back in high school, my female friends used to write “LYLAS” (for “Love you like a sister”) in each other’s yearbooks. Jason obviously approved of the “new” me, so it must have been love: Lots of Love? I was confused, though: What’s “love” got to do with it? I wondered. Jason and I were only friends.
It would be more than a decade before I realized he wasn’t expressing love; he was laughing out loud — with me, not at me, of course. I think I must have been on Facebook when I had my…
