On the Appropriate Use of “LOL”

It is not enough that America’s gimme-now, magazine-modeled culture of convenience—complete with fast-food sexual partners and mass-produced human accessories—has taken punctuation out of acronyms. Nor is it enough that acronyms have become vernacular well beyond the first forays into “Could I get that RSVP ASAP?” Office-overspill broke the damn into “OMG! FTN! He is a totally with that BOB-FOC chick.”[1]

Superfluous acronyms have become a threat to currently scarce reserves of manners and liberty. We must return to some level of anti-hyperbole and protect the borders of our freedoms. If you text, type, or otherwise communicate “LOL”, then for the love of all that is holy mean it! On reading LOL, I want to know that you laughed audibly, perhaps even chortled, guffawed, or violently spewed hot coffee out your nose. I want to feel like something reached through the phone and tickled you in good (or bad) places. LOLs are serious things. They are absolute breaches of protocol and clear security violations.

Granted, I am a logophile who suffers a rare affliction. Symptoms are obsessive desire for strings of letters to mean something. Nevertheless, within LOL there is a real and present danger. Every utterance is the possibility of trouble on the other end. The cover is blown. The code is broken. Chuckle or giggle, that jubilant (or tortured) ejaculation that is “laugh out loud”, leaves the laugher dangerously exposed. Meanwhile, the nefarious laugh-inducer is safely unseen and unaware.

At the workplace, the LOL is a prematurely burst bomb sure to draw:

(a) a nearby boss’s attention like gory chunks of chum attracts sharks or morbidly high death tolls attached to natural disasters attract evangelical nihilists and political vampires; or

(b) signals prospect to that meddling muckraker bent on your pecuniary destruction. Sympathetically, I grant the fun-hating office-psychopath is only trying to create a workplace that echoes his daily misery; we all want a place of validation. But frankly, fuck that person. Fact is, people need to goof off. It helps keep employees sane and unemployment down. What management guides call slacking is survival. And if you have EVER worked for a CEO, you know his personal life from bills to love letters is done at work—often with assistance. These minor escapes are the only shelters from the capitalist work week. Between commutes, pre-game primping, rushed lunches, overtime, soul-draining fluorescence, and post-workplace-fatigue, our forty hours are actually sixty minimum. Take away sleep and texts, email, and electronic refuges are all the human contact we forage?

It is not only the workplace that is in peril. Out with a friend or, worse, on a date? Text is the new fart. And LOL is loud and rotten. Let us put aside that you had your phone out on the table, hidden in your lap, set to vibrate in your pocket, or face up in an open purse to watch peripherally for the light. If the LOL response to a text is literal, then it communicates that whoever reached out and touched your funny bone is oodles more interesting than who you are with. Save yourself from boredom and the dull person with you from humiliation. GO MEET THAT HILLARIOUS PERSON LIVE AND IN THE FLESH! Your little public collogue via telephone is worse than unwanted public pubis. There is no polite “present company excluded” when it comes to inside jokes the company actually within view does not share. Not to mention, that so-called date you are spending zero time on has good right to be a little paranoid. So, if you cannot share it, don’t. Go LIQ (laugh in quiet). A person answering “private” texts in company better be in love, tethered to their job like a bad dog on an electronic leash (in which case, PLEASE do not spend time boring me with work stories and peeves), an ER doctor, or share the frivolity like a teenager shares gossip. This LOLing will righteously compel the other person to tell you to STFU and STUFF that phone down your throat. You have, after all, not only told them they are dull, but duly ignored them.

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[1] You need translation? Alright you troglodyte, out of that cave and into the new century of gratuitously cryptic convo! It parlays: “Oh my god! Fuck that noise! He is totally with that Body off Baywatch, Face off Crimewatch chick”.