But what does your choice betweenhaha(orheheheorhahaha) andlol(orlmaoorlololol) say about you?
Competition
haha
The default way to represent laughter online.
Sometimes accompanied by an emoji.
Can be extended intohahahahahato scale to any joke.
lol
The newer, hipper lower-case version of the old chat-speak standardLOL.
While its cousinROFLhasnt survived,LMAOlives on.
But sometimeshahas awkward insistence on imitating laughter makes it a bad choice.
.where are you anyway?
He spends eight months bothering the stranger with increasingly unhinged texts.
The piece contains 48 uses ofhaha.
Buthahais perfectly acceptable when used after, you know, something funny.
Capitalize toHAHAor even justHAto put some joy back into it, to imply you really lost it.
People pronounced it L.O.L.
like some chemical formula.
They argued whether it was dishonest to write it when you were not literally laughing out loud.
And as it transformed from initialism to word,lollost its capital letters.
As a word,loldoesnt stand for laughing out loud.
you’re free to jazz it up with an Im screaming or an omg dying.
Unlikehaha,lolacknowledges the difference between the signifier and the signified.
It doesnt attempt to replicate the sound of laughter;lolis its own sound.
Unlikehaha,lolcan signify mockery, as in lol nope, or bitterness, as in lol nothing matters.
Is there a downside to lol?
If anyones bristling at reading this word over and over right now, then theyre the downside.
And dont imagine that alolat the end of an unfunny text is any better than ahaha.
Its capacity for negative forms of laughter seems essential in our lol everything sucks, -worthy world.
Urban Dictionary calls itasdfghjkl, but a true keyboard smash would almost never turn up those letters in order.
If youre going to do it, do it for real.
The keyboard smash is popular among gamers, but it has its highbrow fans.
Sichas successor John Herrman called the resultvexingly vague and therefore powerful.
Let your fingers laugh.
