The Day the Laughter Died... lol

I'm not sure... I can't be because of the delightful space fillers of modern internet speak which have ingrained themselves into my most intimate of thought patterns... But were people more likely to laugh or to cry in past decades than they are today? The ever increasing dependency upon technological forms of written exchange... be it SMS, email, MSN or similar has created a whole additional spectra to our written language. The world recognising that these new forms of communication are leading to some very significant changes in the English language. In the not to distant future it wont be remembering to dot i's and cross t's but remembering to capitalise I (the personal pronoun) and spell wat, I mean wHat, with a wh. However it goes far deeper than that.

SMS language is seen to be characterised by the shortening of words or the exclusion of the obvious connectors or prepositions. That is one part of it... the fitting of the most information in the least number of characters is essential at 160 to the text. However a whole additional aspect of the language is the expression of emotion. Humans for thousands of years has used facial expressions and body language to add even more information than the spoken word was capable. Now it seems there is a need to get around that; people bridging the final hurdle in attempt to make the internet communication seem more like true conversation than an exchange of written word.

This leads into the creation of a whole stew of acronyms... the lols, rofls, :(, :)... and so forth of conversation exchanges. It may seem odd that I through in the non-word typed expressions widely recognised as emoticons when I've stated clearly I'm talking about language. Emoticons were created to graphically represent facial expression in text based symbols. They have more in common with the emotion acronyms than the acronyms have with other shortened words. The acronyms have a more lengthy expression but essential represent some emotion condition of the person using it.

The most well known and probably most frequently used emotional acronym in my own experience is probably 'lol'. Most people will be able to tell you that this modern day acronym stand for 'laugh out loud'... I have heard older references of it, one I know is in the movie Sleepless in Seattle (where a letter is written to include quite a bit of modern acronym language), as 'lots of love' but that seems to have died out with the expanding use of the language. There are a number of jokes or quirky one-liners out in today's world about the insinuations of the acronym 'lol' and how people who use it are probably not actually laughing out loud? Probably a typical reply to such a remark would be lol.

Lol... To my I read it and say each of the letters individual 'l.o.l.' but to many it is actually read as a word in its own right lol... Which i must admit is what it has become. Lol, from personal experience only, is used where something is considered to be mildly amusing to a person. A number of other expressions escalate from there such as rolf, lmao. Possibly depending on a person the emoticon :) sits beneath the lol on the scale of one's expressed mirth. However is its acronym 'laugh out loud' applicable? People would be highly unlikely to have laughed outright and to respond with a simple lol right? Well you can't be sure... How about this question though, they aren't laughing now, but if they didn't know to say/think 'lol' how would that have responded to the stimulas (whatever it was)?

That is a point I think is of significance when looking at this whole new world language, emotion speak. People today have a whole host of emotive laguage at their disposal and quite instinctively just like they do with the rest of their language they use it to catergories and analyse. The language adds a whole host of purely emotive meanings enabling them to label the feeling they feel upon hearing a corny joke for the 50th time as easily as looking at a table and thinking 'table'. There is no getting around the thought process it is subconscious even before a person realises they are doing it. There is also no way of going backwards, no way of looking at a tree blankly and wondering what you would call that... its a tree!

I wonder if by giving people these new words we aren't being striped of some of the more simplistic responces to amusement. I doubt laughter will ever be banished or anything as drastic as that but do people laugh as often, as easily, as openly, as they used to? Or has terms like lol and the need to express it in a written form removed some of the instinctive responce to humour or sadness or fury from the everyday person? I'm not sure whether this new language is making people any better at expressing their emotions... or worse.

I am one of the thousands probably millions of people who find lol crops up in their internal thoughts even when not involved in internet conversations or communicating via text. Sometimes it just passes by I'm not even aware that I've done it. Others it bugs me... I feel like I'm more addicted than I ever wanted to be to internet speak. Outside that though it intrigues me I know how I'm responding to something because of the thought emoticon or acronym but what would I have felt if I hadn't had that there ready to come to mind? Would I have laughed instead?