Nina In New York: LOL Is No Longer A Laughing Matter ????

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

It's official. Like chat rooms, AOL Instant Messenger, and beeper codes (143 133 2439834829485!! :)), "LOL" is officially so 1996.

Facebook has conducted important new data research showing that the sort of time-honored acronym meaning "Laugh Out Loud" is a thing of the past. Auf wiedersehen. It's out like hammer pants, which is to say that it's been all but abandoned, save for some defiant holdouts who mostly continue to use it ironically. The millennium is all about the "haha" (of varying lengths), the emojis (those cute little faces and symbols and figures and smiling turds), and, to a lesser extent, "hehe."

The Facebook report drills down pretty deep into the lexicon of virtual humor, delving into age, gender and geographic region. You can read it here if you really want to. I didn't. Ha ha. LOL.

I have to admit to judging people on the basis of their usage of internet "laughter." LOL has always posed obvious problems in its near-criminal overstatement of the user's level of actual mirth. How many things truly make you "laugh out loud"? I'm not considering "laugh" to be defined by anything less than a full, hearty guffaw. Chuckles, giggles, sniggers, chortles, and snorts need not apply. Saying "LOL" quickly became a near-certain indication of an utter lack of humor, in fact. Oftentimes, it's used as a kind of verbal tic, a way of taking back a statement before it even lands:

"I'm eating ice cream lol"

Are you eating ice cream? What's funny about that? Do you feel badly about the ice cream? Do you think I think it's terrible or strange that you would be eating ice cream? Perhaps you are simply attempting to indicate that you're saying this with a smile, in which case I'd recommend first rephrasing, and if all else fails, throwing in an appropriate emoji. But if you send me a bland happy face, we are probably not going to be soul sisters.

If this all sounds stupid and meaningless, you're right. Sort of. The fact is, for better or worse, this is the way we communicate now. So it's high time we all get a little better at it. Just because we now use cartoon eggplants and acronyms to express ourselves doesn't mean we can't still do so with some sophistication and grace. There needs to be a little more effort here. Regardless of the medium, there must always be a way to distinguish oneself.

Then again, I guess I've always been a little grouchy about written expressions of jollity. For many years, before the proliferation of mobile communications, I found the exclamation point to be an irksome, cloying punctuation mark that should be reserved only for the most truly exciting or explosive situations. But I get it -- computers are tone-deaf, and it's difficult to get one's message across with the proper intent. So we go a little bit too far, overcompensating to make sure that we're properly understood.

But, like, whatever happened to . . . I don't know. Writing? In sentences? If you want someone to understand that you mean something to be funny, why don't you write it so that it's funny? We are getting further and further from the actual English language as it was intended. My daughter and her peers will probably have a more nuanced understanding of emoji usage and the proper application of "haha" versus "hehe" than of complex sentence structure.

Lol this is so depressing.

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Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!