DOES “LOL” HAVE A MEANING?
DOES “LOL” HAVE A MEANING? I have posted a number of times on the thoughts of John McWhorter, the linguist who convinced me to abandon prescriptive grammar, much to Mary Jane’s dismay. Here is his assertion that “lol” had a meaning ten years ago, but that now it has become grammar. Ten years ago, it meant “laughing out loud”. Now, “LOL” conveys an attitude, that a sentence is to be taken as an ironic comment. He analogizes what “LOL” does to a sentence to what the ending “-ed” does to a sentence by signaling that a verb is conveying something that happened in the past.