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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

Are we still pretending "lol" is not just a piece of grammar now?

I am still trying to get over someone actually loudly saying "lol" while laughing

omg wtf. irl?

This morphing of LOL is used as an example in the very interesting and enjoyable book "Words on the Move: Why English Won't – and Can't – Sit Still (Like, Literally)" by John McWhorter.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/words-on-the-move-why-english-w...

All of McWhorter's material is great. Highly recommend his audiobooks.

It has always been, in Dutch (it means 'fun'). And the Dutch have been very early and influential on IRC (where the acronym stems from).

How did it come to replace the period as the marker for the end of a sentence?

It doesn't mark the end of a sentence. It marks that the sentence is not to be taken with the utmost seriousness.

If you put it like that, the marker would only make sense in an otherwise serious conversation. But when it's used as a stop marker for every other message in a texting app, that's already a very casual and light-hearted environment, why do some people feel the need to reinforce it again and again? Maybe I'm overthinking it lol

lmao

Because human communication involves redundancy of information.

It's also interesting, i frequently use `lol.` as a sort of combination emotion, where i'm signalling laughing but also abruptly stopping. Meaningfully different than a `heh`. Likewise `heh` and `heh.` have a very distinct feel.

Language is weird, it just comes naturally and organically and i go with the flow. Though i find this style of writing mostly done in texting. Long/medium form doesn't benefit as greatly from it.

I've indeed seen it used to mean basically 'this is serious but don't take it too seriously' if that makes sense, in the way that someone might say: 'university education is useless for the current job market lol'. I guess there are levels to this thing.

It'll be really disturbing when execs and legal departments start using it to soften bad news.

> Due to macroeconomic headwinds, we’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 40 percent lol

> How did it come to replace the period as the marker for the end of a sentence lol

FTFY

I don't believe it's happened yet; Merriam-Webster still has it as an abbreviation only spelled as LOL whereas in practice it's already used as a verb.

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