infundibulum

Perhaps I’m off my rocker, but sometimes I wonder if the word lol, as in… erm, you know what it means… could ever escape from the intarwebs into meatspace?

I was just digging through a rather amazing series of photos from an ice storm, which contains the following caption:

Here is a closer crop of the above image. Look how the ice grew as it spun around lol.  There wasn’t any wind now, otherwise I’m guessing this would still spin like the one I saw the day before.

There’s something about this usage that seems “wordy” to me: for one thing, I find it difficult to avoid a comparison to Cantonese’s famous “tag” word, la, for which the always-amusing UrbanDictionary.com provides the definition:

cantonese exclamation which can be added after every single sentence
so cute la/ okay la/ bye la

I find it difficult to articulate why the particular caption above made me think of this, but there’s something about it… maybe it’s emphasized by the fact that there’s no comma?
Or maybe I really am off my rocker.