Haha, check out the LOL breakdown
You probably remember LOL from your days using AOL Instant Messenger. While official documentation of his birth does not exist, it is safe to say that the stardom of the acronym standing for “laugh out loud” began in the early 2000s after the boom of instant and text messaging.
After bursting onto the computer-mediated-communication scene in the first couple years of the 21st century, LOL seemed unstoppable. He was young and popular with text messengers and AIM users alike — his future was bright.
He was by far the most commonly used text message acronym in the business. LOL was direct and to the point. At the time, he was simply the best way to tell someone you were genuinely laughing out loud. The envy of all other laugh indicator acronyms, LOL was the biggest star in text messaging.
But following in the footsteps of Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes and many other former child stars who made it big at about that time, LOL’s fame was followed by troubling years.
Soon after LOL’s emergence in technological communication, a new player came onto the scene — Haha. Haha was the first of his kind. He was not a word, nor was he an acronym. He was simply the sound of laughter spelled out. Haha was innovative and fresh, and he soon began getting the jobs that LOL formerly had the monopoly on.
Appearing on the subject lines of thousands of emails per day and peppering text and instant messages, Haha was a star. LOL simply took a back seat.
“No one wants to laugh out loud anymore,” LOL said in a 2007 interview. “They just want to Haha. What even is Haha? It’s just a sound. I describe the action…I describe the action,” he repeated sorrowfully.
After a few years of sparse job opportunities and multiple rehab stints, the demand for LOL began to return but in a way that no one — not even LOL himself — imagined.
People began using him, not to say they were laughing out loud, but for an entirely different purpose. LOL started to be used to mean things like “don’t take what I just said seriously,” or “I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, but I can tell you’re trying to be funny so I’m just going to write LOL so it seems like I understood.”
With the continual use of LOL to mean pretty much anything besides actually “laughing out loud,” Haha began to be used in a synonymous fashion. People were including Haha in their text messages so the person they were sending it to knew that what was being said was intended to be a joke of sorts.
After stealing the limelight from LOL a few years ago, Haha and LOL are now interchangeable.
Neither genuinely mean that someone is truly “laughing out loud” or “haha-ing.”
At about the same time that Haha and LOL became the likes of crocodile tears, a new hotshot came onto the scene — Hahaha. Similar to Haha, Hahaha provided that extra flavor to written messages that Haha was simply no longer bringing to the table.
But the madness doesn’t stop there. As soon as Hahaha showed up, people began to demand more. Yeah, you guessed it; Hahahaha is the latest expression of genuine laughter in text messaging. I suspect that in ten to twenty years people will have to use upwards of thirty “ha’s” and at least three laugh-face emoticons to effectively explain true laughter through the typed word.
Looking back, LOL had no chance. What began as a promising career as a laugh indication acronym, LOL has turned into a strange and twisted palindrome that has no real meaning.
Patrick Ryan is a UF English senior. His columns appear Thursdays.
