Stop The LOL Madness!

There is an epidemic sweeping our nation. An LOL epidemic. It’s in our emails, our Facebook pages, our t-shirts (not mine), our text messages, everywhere.

LOL is internet slang for laugh out loud. It’s quite the compliment when someone responds to something you’ve written with “LOL.” Receiving a “HAHAHA!” or “You’re so funny!“ is also pretty good because your humor has been acknowledged, but a full-fledged LOL means that you actually made your reader laugh out loud. Nice work.

Somewhere along the way, however, people have started to use LOL with reckless abandon. They drop it arbitrarily and haphazardly in places where it doesn‘t belong. They use it within their own dialogue and, perhaps most importantly, they are using it when they’re not really laughing out loud. 

We are living within the generational throws of LOL anarchy. Our social mediums are being overtaken due to a total lack of absence of enforced authority. We can either take cover and maintain current conditions, or we can move forward towards some sense of order and control.

Do I stand alone amidst this LOL free-for-all? Am I the only one who feels that LOL is not being used as it was once intended? Could it be?

Could it be just me?

Allow me to offer up some of the offenses I have witnessed and some of the offenders with whom I take issue:

Part 1: The Offences

Placing LOL within a comment of your own is pretty risky. For those of you who insist on taking this risk (don‘t look around, you know who you are), I would like to know if you are really sitting there laughing out loud…? Probably not. I don’t care how funny you are, you are not sitting there LOL’ing at something you wrote.

A simple smiley face emoticon works wonders in these instances. You’re getting your point across with a smile instead of forcing funny. Plus, I feel like you’re telling me that you’re laughing at what you wrote and I should too. Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not the boss of me. You don’t get to tell me that what you wrote is funny. I get to tell YOU if it’s funny. And if it is, I will respond by writing LOL. Not you. Me.

BTW, ending your sentence with LOL doesn’t automatically make it funny. It doesn’t.

Part 2: The Offenders

Some people are LOL Two-fers (i.e. they write a sentence with not one but two LOL’s in it, one in the middle of the sentence and one at the end). These sentences usually have a lot of “…” and they look something like this: I saw Joe at the store today…he totally looked at me…LOL…I bet he never calls though ..LOL. Nothing is funny and no one is laughing out loud. Cut it out, Two-fers!

The Nervous LOL’er. I see this quite a bit. The Nervous LOL’er ends something they’ve written with LOL because they’re not entirely confident in what they wrote. They are socially anxious people, but they still want to be part of the conversation. They hope that if the reader finds no humor in their comment, at the very least they’ll think it’s just a joke because it was concluded with LOL. Nervous LOL’ers use LOL as their wing man but I say: Go solo. Lose LOL! Let your freak flag fly!

It’s bad when moms use LOL, but it’s not the worst. I’m going to go so far as to say that moms are borderline acceptable LOL offenders. Maybe I’m biased, but I feel that moms sacrifice so much,they deserve a little LOL leeway. If you are a mom who drives a minivan, wears mom jeans and has the “mom bob,” you get the LOL nod (you have to embody all three though). You are hereby permitted to use LOL in your sentences. Put that Town and Country in PARK, hike up those mom jeans and LOL your ass off.

Are you a single woman looking for a relationship? Guess how I feel about you using LOL in your sentences?? If you are looking to hook up with someone who is a total dork, you should definitely do it. If you want someone who is cool, then outside of a response to something that elicits an actual laugh, I would tread carefully.

If, however, you find the man you are going to marry by peppering your sentences with LOL, let me know and I will graciously retract this. But if he also uses a lot of LOL in his sentences, you guys have canceled each other out and my statement still stands.

Most of us are guilty of one or more LOL violations. It’s not your fault. LOL has been virtually on its own since its inception with no one to govern its usage or define its rules. But thanks to me generously providing some very basic LOL guidelines, and the wherewithal to proceed on course, you are now armed with the necessary means to move forward (with caution).

It’s time to give LOL a permanent home as the acronym that represents real laughter. Smiley face emoticons work fine for everything else. It’s up to us to put an end to these LOL violations.

We can do it. Spread the word. Stop the madness! 🙂

Thanks for being here!

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