LOL is the word that got me through 2020
I used to look down on lol-lovers with barely disguised contempt. I mean, how goddam corny can you be? Come on! El Oh El? What is this, 2003 or something? What a bunch of innocents, I would think to my smug little self, looking down on these lowest of the online low, these cultural irks; keep away from me you smelly weirdos! Thoughts like these have hung out and about in the back of my mind, not to mention the front, FOREVER, harking back even to those early frontier sms days when lol lingo was supposedly the hip and cool mainline of awakened youth. And, let’s be clear: You were very definitely wrong if you disagreed with me on this one.
Then 2020 happened.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly at first—like a slow summer sunset in polar lands, those sneaky little letters—l and o and l again—slipped into my online presence like puppy eyes slip into your soul. Before I knew it, lol was freakin’ everywhere, spread out across my forensic footprint like Nutella across a palm oil magnate’s wet dreams, and to my great surprise it was simply too late and—dare I say, pointless—to stop using it. I had succumbed, and I realised then and there that life would never be the same.
The thing is though: I’m worried I might not be using it right, this little lol, which sometimes keeps me awake on sleepless 2020 nights. Either lol has stretched its wings of meaning even further, or: I have—in fact—become a disturbed individual and that’s why no-one’s replying to my messages anymore. Was it something I said, Dick? Reply to me already, Anne!
Back in the dark ages of electronic communication, circa the early 2000s, lol truly meant “I laughed out loud haw haw haw!” How cute is that, right? A decade or so later—2013 to be precise, there came a sudden and unexpected stirring in the cultural ether as linguist John McWhorter TED-talked us all into a brave new world. Lol was now:
“…being used in a very particular way. It’s a marker of empathy. It’s a marker of accommodation. We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles…”
Pragmatic particles are words like, “Oh, I see” or “Well, I don’t know”, which signal to your face-to-face or online chat buddy that you’re right at their level of understanding; you’ve got their back; you don’t think that far-out if not borderline immoral thing they’ve just described doing was far-out or borderline at all. It was completely normal. Modern-day lol lingo lovers immediately recognise that you can slip lol into these two phrases without batting an eyelid: “lol, I see”, and “lol, I don’t know”.
Barely one year before this 2013 TED-talk turning point in our understanding of lol, author Louis Franzini was saying things like:
“Research has not yet determined what percentage of people who type LOL are actually laughing out loud at the time.”
That’s a very Nokia-one-year-before-the-iPhone kind of research goal, that one is.
As the years have passed and the grey hairs flourished, lol has only gotten more sassy, more multimodal, more—dare I say it—contextual, if not personal.
It has taken on the mantles of irony, ambivalence, and even—surprisingly perhaps—distinctive non-funniness. In an article in The Atlantic in 2016, Megan Garber broke down a Kim Kardashian West instagram post in which the latter captioned a naked selfie with:
“When you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL.”
All of the three modern meanings are flashing (like bright lights—obviously) here: irony, ambivalence, and a complete lack of anything amusing to chew on.
Another twist to the non-funniness: that all-on-its-lonesome ‘lol’ you sometimes get in reply to a moment of wit these days probably actually means, ‘Your attempt at humour was really not top-shelf, but let’s try to move on and remain friends despite that.’
And then there’s a perhaps even more recent usage of lol as a ‘linguistic shock absorber’ as described by Amelia Tate in a 2018 New Statesman article:
“Now, a quick Twitter search shows that ‘lol’ has been used a multitude of times to end the following sentences:
“I’m so depressed lol.”
“I had an anxiety attack lol.”
“I want to kill myself lol.”
“In these instances, no one is actually laughing about their own mental health. ‘Lol’ has become a linguistic shock absorber–used to dampen the impact of overly-emotional statements.”
This style of usage also works for overly-emotional statements where the awkwardness is not quite so—how to put it—life endangering, such as for instance sentences like,
“I actually quite like that new Taylor Swift song lol”.
(Unless you are chatting with a gun-loving snobbish music maniac.)
Which brings us to 2020. Fuck 2020, by the way. A few months ago, I started to realise that not only had lol slipped into my vocabulary, but also: It was coming in at the dark, dark end of the spectrum, in sentences typically conveying the following kinds of ideas: ‘2020 is such a shitshow already; now look at this; fuck me sideways’. Except that I use lol in the place of ‘fuck me sideways’. Here’s one example I sent to a friend that comes from the less dark end of dark:
"Trump, in his last month in office, has decided to sell off 1.5 million hectares of Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Lol."
Currently, only some of my friends would use lol in such a sentence—I know this because I unscientifically sampled them. It made complete sense to a few, and along with the darkness it clearly ropes in several previous uses of ‘lol’: a shared emotional reaction to the politician in question, irony, and distinct non-hilarity. Nothing to do with linguistic shock absorption though, and zero ambivalence to be seen.
As for the darker end of dark, the following CNN quote—with an ‘lol’ appended to the end by (*ahem) yours truly—came out of El Paso, Texas as it fought a terrible rise in Covid-19 cases in late November:
“During a Monday meeting, Commissioner Carlos Leon said the county is looking for more cold storage to treat those who are dying ‘with dignity’.” “Lol.”
Again, this may have you questioning whether or not I’m a decent human being, but I dare you to say that the lol doesn’t work here at some—ghastly perhaps—level. The situation is deeply unfunny, yet you can’t deny that this turn of phrase does invoke irony, and perhaps even a disturbed, out loud chuckle, not at the event itself, but at the fact this awful sentence got past the Editor. Clearly, there is no shock absorption here; if anything, the ‘lol’ amplifies the shock.
Sending this very test-quote to one friend led to the following chain of replies on Messenger:
Her: oh jesus
Me: maybe ‘oh jesus’ is better than ‘lol’?
Her: looooolll
Me: what does looooolll mean then?
Her: awkward lol? haha
As hinted at above, I also know—deep in my soul—that not all of my online friends would appreciate—or even accept—this darker usage of lol, which makes it abundantly clear that one ground rule for using ‘lol’ in this way is that you and your chat buddy have a similar and previously-encoded conception of what is and is not acceptable to bring up in polite conversation.
Though this debate over the acceptable usage of lol will continue to rage into long nights of linguistic delight, one thing is sure: I am mere humble beginner when it comes to the expansive possibilities of lol; and maybe we all are. My personal amateur status was made brutally clear to me by yet another friend who I questioned on the subject. She has her own cutting southern-Italian twist to it which involves lol and CAPITAL LETTERS. Here’s a typical example:
Me: “It was great to chat, we really should catch up soon.”
Her: “LOL NO”.
Which, ironically, made me laugh out loud for real.