unculturedswine

A short while ago I sent a funny text to my mom and she replied with a simple ‘lol’. Now, this is pretty normal conversation anymore, but coming from my mom it kinda shocked me. She’s not an IM client user, a chat fanatic, super texter or what have you; she’s just my mom. So to have her say ‘lol’ to me really kinda took me off guard.

And then I got to thinking: we use ‘lol’ everywhere. It stands for ‘Laugh Out Loud’. So, I have to ask, how often are you really laughing out loud when someone texts you or chats over something funny. For me it’s probably 1% of the time do I actually make an outward laugh; usually it’s just an inside chuckle.

This should change, immediately. We’re creating a society in which we all think we’re completely hilarious because to us it appears that people are laughing out loud at all the slightly, barely funny comments we make. We’re not much different than the disillusioned off-key singers that we love to actually laugh out loud at on American Idol. Let’s face, most of us just aren’t that funny!

So what do we do? We change. We stop using lol unless we actually mean it! Try using something like ‘inside chuckle’ (ic), or ‘that was witty’ (tww), or even ‘I’m laughing on the inside’ (iloti).

It might take time for these acronyms to spread the webiverse and text-lines, but this is a movement we need to take seriously, or the humor well is going to dry up and we’ll all become as stale as the Canadians.

Just kidding, Canadians can be funny, I even know a few of them.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.