Lol

There is a reason why I absolutely can’t stand that word. Whenever I see those three letters, especially the little dance they do on MSN Messenger windows, it makes me fume.

Don’t get me wrong here. I am not averse to using abbreviations myself. In fact, I use two of them quite a lot: “gtg” for “(I have) got to go”, and “brb” for “(I will) be right back”. I am also not against the use of smileys, but I most positively detest their overuse. How many times have I seen half the sentences in a piece ending with a “:)”? You’re killing it!

But I digress, as has become quite a common tendency of late, and so I shall proceed right away.

First of all, "lol" has no universally agreed-upon meaning; some people define it to be “Lots of Laughs” while some others prefer “Laughing Out Loud”. Make up your mind!

And secondly, it doesn’t make any distinction whatsoever between a chuckle and a hard laugh. At least it doesn’t appear that way when we chat. Anything remotely funny and wham! “lol” or "lolzz". Either you guys laugh out loud or laugh a lot (see my point?) all the time, which is not bad; it is good to find humor in almost everything, but after a point I suspect your computer ejects laughing gas at almost every message you receive.

I won’t go as far as saying that there isn’t an entry for "lol" in your generic dictionary (I am not referring to urbandictionary.com though; for that website takes English to the next level and beyond that too.), or that Microsoft Word refuses to recognize it, for you could say the same for “brb” and “gtg”.

Then you have its derivatives “rofl”, and “roflol”, meaning “rolling on the floor laughing”, and “rolling on the floor laughing out loud”. How superfluous once more. Why not make up “roflolasmha” (“rolling on the floor laughing out loud and scratching my hairy ass”)? Another such abbreviation is “lmao”, which supposedly means “laughing my ass off”.

Now you may wonder how my favorites “brb” and “gtg” are different from “lol”. Good question. Well, my abbreviations bear more than a passing resemblance to how you and I would say them when talking to someone face to face. This is where “lol” falls short.

Note here that I am not a strict grammarian, nor do I consider myself the supposed savior of the English language (or Hindi for that matter). I may have made some grammatical mistakes in this very post itself. But all I'm saying is that don't make up three-letter abbreviations just for the heck of it, or because they lie in close proximity to one another on your keyboard.

If you’re accusing me of discouraging you to express your laughter at something apparently funny, you’re wrong. I am not doing that. I am merely asking you to consider other alternatives. You may then ask me what else we could use to acknowledge a witty joke or a humorous incident.

Why can’t we say “ha”, “haha”, “hahahahahahaha dude that’s so frickin’ hilarious man!”, or “heh”, “hehe”, “hehehe how cheesy!” and other variants depending on our style or take on how frickin’ hilarious/cheesy we thought the joke to be?