Al Coholic
02-09-2012, 05:11 PM
Is lol here to stay?
Each generation, decade, whatever, has its own words and phrases that come with it, and many die with it. In some cases, they are only preserved as something we use to stereotype and mock the genreation. If I told you a character in a movie said something was "totally radical dude!" You would immediately think this was a 1980's adolescent stock character who more than likely skateboards.
If you also thought he's a teenage mutant ninja turtle, good for you.
With the 1990s came widespread use of the internet and soon to follow cell phones. Chat room lingo like 'lol' was soon carried over to cell phones, with their at-the-time limited capacity for texting. Ofcourse now (and now is only about a decade since lol's widespread use) new innovations in texting have caused people to be able to write more, and faster. Things like T9, swype to text, talk to text, and just plain full keyboards have made abbreviations less common, n typin lik dis isnt wat u c ppl doin as much. It would be silly to think that since all these innovations have come in just the last few years, another few wouldn't see an exponential increase.
However, some people type out full sentences, with perfect grammar and punctuation, and still choose to throw in the occasional lol. Which is indicative that it's found its own place in our language, and has survived past a need for fast typing convinience. Lol has evolved way outside of other chat room abbreviations like brb. But unlike the brb's and ttyl's of modern communication, those are abbreviations of phrases people said long before the internet. Lol is new, and a product of new communication - instant, faceless, and voiceless(okay, there was the telegraph, but you know what I mean). So on the one hand it is part of a new generations new made up words, but on the other it has outlived its intended purpose and adapted itself over time.
So the question is, will lol become an obsolete word of a past generation, or is it here to stay for the long haul? Will our grandkids watch parodies and movies about our generation and think all of us said lol all the time? Or will they be using lol in their own evolved forms of communication?
?
Each generation, decade, whatever, has its own words and phrases that come with it, and many die with it. In some cases, they are only preserved as something we use to stereotype and mock the genreation. If I told you a character in a movie said something was "totally radical dude!" You would immediately think this was a 1980's adolescent stock character who more than likely skateboards.
If you also thought he's a teenage mutant ninja turtle, good for you.
With the 1990s came widespread use of the internet and soon to follow cell phones. Chat room lingo like 'lol' was soon carried over to cell phones, with their at-the-time limited capacity for texting. Ofcourse now (and now is only about a decade since lol's widespread use) new innovations in texting have caused people to be able to write more, and faster. Things like T9, swype to text, talk to text, and just plain full keyboards have made abbreviations less common, n typin lik dis isnt wat u c ppl doin as much. It would be silly to think that since all these innovations have come in just the last few years, another few wouldn't see an exponential increase.
However, some people type out full sentences, with perfect grammar and punctuation, and still choose to throw in the occasional lol. Which is indicative that it's found its own place in our language, and has survived past a need for fast typing convinience. Lol has evolved way outside of other chat room abbreviations like brb. But unlike the brb's and ttyl's of modern communication, those are abbreviations of phrases people said long before the internet. Lol is new, and a product of new communication - instant, faceless, and voiceless(okay, there was the telegraph, but you know what I mean). So on the one hand it is part of a new generations new made up words, but on the other it has outlived its intended purpose and adapted itself over time.
So the question is, will lol become an obsolete word of a past generation, or is it here to stay for the long haul? Will our grandkids watch parodies and movies about our generation and think all of us said lol all the time? Or will they be using lol in their own evolved forms of communication?
?