LOL

First of all, this whole post stems from a Skype conversation I had some time last term on French slang. I will probably have to post about that some time later. Also, all of this information I've snagged from wikipedia. So take it with a grain of salt.

Anyway, I like language, and I had (for a time) a bit of a foray into, well into Leet...and memes, and so on...so hooray. Let's talk about lol.

For you complete noobs out there, lol stands for 'laugh out loud', although it's come to mean so much more. There's lolz, lulz, lolwut, lolcats, and so on. And that's leaving out rofl, roflcopter, blah blah blah. I don't think I have ever really used any of these seriously, more as a type of sarcastic texty comment when something's particularly unfunny. Right. That's not the interesting part.

So how do people in other languages laugh out loud when no one's around to appreciate it? Expressing humor graphically is tricky and nuanced art...

In France, one apparently might write mdr, for mort de rire, something along the lines of dying laughing?

Meanwhile, in Thailand, 555 is used, as the number five in Thai is pronounced 'ha' (good, huh).

There's rs for risos, asg for asgarv, and simply g for griner; many languages that don't use an English alphabet, like Thai, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian take a rough approximation of a laughing noise and string that symbol together, or translate l-o-l into more familiar own characters.

Indeed, a lot of languages that share a common alphabet with English just take lol as an expression of amusement and leave it at that...

However, a select few (wikipedia tells me) actually have a word in their languages that is spelled, well, l-o-l. Fantastically, in Dutch, lol means fun, and in Welsh, it means nonsense. Wonderful? Wonderful!

So there you have it, straight from the internet to you. Spice up your texting and increase your Skyping vocab! Just be cautious, or you won't be understood.