LOL.COM is a joke site.
LOLSITES -
sites using the slang term LOL (also written lol and any
other combination) is a common element of Internet slang used,
historically, on Usenet but now widespread to other forms of
computer-mediated communication, and even spread to face-to-face
communication.
It is an abbreviation for "laughing out loud" or
"laugh out loud". "LOL" is one of many initialisms for expressing
bodily reactions, in particular laughter, as text, including
initialisms such as "ROFL" ("roll(ing) on the floor laughing"), a
more emphatic expression of laughter, and "BWL" ("bursting with
laughter"), above which there is "no greater compliment" according
to Magid.
The list of initialisms "grows by the month" and they are
collected along with emoticons and smileys into folk dictionaries
which are circulated informally amongst users of Usenet, IRC, and
other forms of (textual) computer-mediated communication. These
initialisms are controversial, and several authors recommend
against their use, either in general or in specific contexts such
as business communications.
LOL is also a movie.
The use of LOL to express laughter is unrelated to other uses of
the abbreviation, many of which (such as "lots of love") predate
the Internet. LOL has also superseded the more-obvious "Ha!" that
letter writers used to use.
"LOL", "ROFL", "LMFAO"
and the other initialisms have crossed from computer-mediated
communication to face-to-face communication. Teenagers now
sometimes use them in spoken communication as well as in
written, with "ROFL" for example. David Crystal—likening
the introduction of "LOL", "ROFL", and others into spoken
language in magnitude to the revolution of Johannes
Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the 15th
century—states that this is "a brand new variety of language
evolving", invented by young people within five years, that "extend[s]
the range of the language, the expressiveness [and] the
richness of the language". Commentators disagree, saying that
these new words, being abbreviations for existing, long-used,
phrases, don't "enrich" anything; they just shorten it.
Geoffrey K. Pullum points out that even if interjections such
as "LOL" and "ROFL" were to become very common in spoken
English, their "total effect on language" would be "utterly
trivial".
Conversely, a 2003 study of college students by Naomi Baron
found that the use of these initialisms in computer-mediated
communication, specifically in instant messaging, was actually
lower than to be expected. The students "used few
abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons". The spelling was
"reasonably good" and contractions were "not ubiquitous". Out
of 2,185 transmissions, there were 90 initialisms in total,
only 31 CMC-style abbreviations, 49 emoticons, and just 76
occurrences of "LOL". |
