The Fight for rLOL

A lot of my life philosophy is based on smiles.  I strive to smile as often as I can, and I try my best to make others smile as well.  This site is my shared smile collection.  In this article, I'd like to rant briefly about the Internet phenomenon of the LOL.

For those of you living under a rock, LOL is chat-speak for "laugh out loud".  In itself, it seems like a fantastic little way to add your emotions to the end of a chat message or exchange.  Indeed, quite frequently when chatting with strangers or friends, I do actually catch myself laughing out loud.  It is a sincere and great way to textually convey that reaction back to the other party.

For a few years, I fought hard in forums and chat exchanges to STOP people from misusing LOL at the end of every single statement.  People were over using it.  Crazy!  I chat with some people (often between the ages of 12 and 18, bit not always) and they literally use LOL in every message.

Unless these people are clinically insane, I have to assume they're not actually laughing at everything I say.  I've seen LOL used at the end of even the most serious topics.

It seems a lost cause.  LOL has become the new emoticon of choice.  Instead of meaning; "I laughed out loud just now", it has changed, and now means almost nothing.  To most people, it doesn't even mean the message made you smile.  Teenagers use LOL like a period.  In fact, some use it more than punctuation, because it seems chat-speak doesn't require punctuation or capitalization anymore, but that's another rant altogether.  In some chat exchanges, LOL appears more than any other word or phrase.

This makes me sad.  A sincere LOL is a reward to me.  In person, I know when I've made you smile or laugh in conversation, but in a textual exchange, I reply on you telling me when you smiles, smirked, giggled or outright belly laughed.  It's not a requirement, but it's polite.  I want to know if what I said deserved or justified a reaction.  I want to know when you LOL.

My best buddy recently started LOL'ing me on everything.  When I send messages with some humour or sarcasm, I often include (grin) or "giggle " but suddenly I noticed he was LOL'ing almost everything.  I knew I hadn't gotten funnier.  He'd been infected by the pop culture usage rules, and suddenly his LOL meant nothing to me.  It made me sad.

As a compromise, we came up with rLOL.  It stands quite simply for "real" LOL.  He uses it ONLY when he ACTUALLY laughs out loud, and uses (smile) for a real smile or LOL for everything else.  In this way, he gets to continue to feel hip and in the middle of pop culture chat-speak, and I get rewarded for my efforts and energy when I make a comment worth of a real laugh.

Now if we can just get the rest of the world to go along.

SUPPORT rLOL. 

Click the SHARE THIS link and BLOG it everywhere.  As always, I'd love a link back to this site, but in this case - I don't need credit.  rLOL is a gift to the real world.  A gift to funny people who make people laugh and smile and deserve the right to know when they've done so.