I wasn’t witness to this one, but Anna saw some teenage girls at Kinokuniya in Manhattan who were those types of people who say chatspeak words out loud. When I think about it, there are entire generations of people out there who grew up with chatspeak just being completely pervasive. To them, they aren’t silly short hand for things that people on the internet needed a way to translate to text. So to them I guess they can be things that you say out loud.
Still though, the words that come between asterisks are supposed to be verbs indicating an action you’re taking, should they really be said out loud? I still will rather write out “hahaha” while online instead of using “LOL” which I’ll only use when I know that the person on the other side is using a chat client that will translate it into an emoticon.
The fun thing that the Dutch word “lol” actually means “fun”. I know there are many dutch kids who don’t know what lol stands for, or even that it is an acronym.
Other than that I think I’ve said “lol” (in a non-satirical matter) about once or twice in my life – by accident
Interesting! That’s a good bit of trivia. I’ve said “lol” only when I’m making fun of people who would say it in real life.
Some people over here thought it stands for “Lots of Love”
So, its quite awkward if you give this message to your loved ones “sorry for your loss, LOL. Sincerely yours.”
Heh, I saw one of those on reddit where someone’s grandmother thought it meant “Lots of love.” In this day and age it’s good to google acronyms before using them.
They spray paint the road and sidewalks to indicate where underground lines are buried–natural gas, water, sewer, etc–before they take out the road to re-pave or replace old pipelines. I saw a maze today of dots, dashes, and arrows with little code abbreviations and numbers, and someone had graffitied amidst the mayhem: LOL–>
I used to be one of them, when I was around other internet peoples who understood. It’s definitely a pervasive thing, in the sense that people who use the internet a lot are part of a somewhat different culture with it’s own dialect and so when together in real life it makes enough sense to speak in the same way.