Could “lol” ever become a real live word?
January 6th, 2007Perhaps 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.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any sinogram for lol – at least phonetically… Cantonese was of no help here: the only language related somehow to Chinese with a final -L is Korean, and there’s no sinogram reading lol. I found three sinograms that could be used for their meaning [loud laughter]:
㘌 kek6/ju4
㰤 kaa3/ke3
䐖 zi4/yi2
[Cantonese/Mandarin]
I particularly like the first one, 㘌/kek since it is based on 劇 kek6/ju4 – theatrical plays, drama, opera. The 口 added in front of 劇 to make 㘌 is hau2/kou3 the mouth, which is fitting
So I declare that from now on 㘌 is the official Chinese translation for LOL.
㘌, if I may say so myself!
- dda @ 9 January 2007㘌㘌
- pat @ 10 January 2007[…] What I like in pat’s writings is that his view on things are always off-centre and interesting. He’s a fellow linguist, with the same curiosity and eagerness about languages as I think I have. And with this post on LOL, he provoked amusing, if slightly off-topic – as far as teh Internets is concerned. […]
- Life’s too short to brag about microcosm achievements. » Blog Archive » 㘌 @ 10 January 2007