To LOL or not to LOL...

A little less serious blog today. A brief discussion on the use of LOL or ROFL

As everyone in the world knows the problem with communicating by text is that it is easy to misread the tone. What was written as a light-hearted bit of banter can be read as vicious and nasty by the person reading it. Sarcasm and irony are particularly vulnerable to being missed or misunderstood.

So someone came up with various ways for us to indicate our mood or tone. There are smilies and then there are things like LOL and ROFL (for the totally ignorant Laugh Out Loud and Roll on the Floor Laughing).

Now I have less of a problem with the selective use of smilies than I do LOL. Many an arguement has been avoided by the judicious use of ;-) although there is always punctuation problem as following ;-) with any other punctuation always looks a little strange. ;-).

But I digress.

My issue with LOL is that people have started applying it to their own comments. It's become the written equivalent of laughing at your own joke. No, even worse it has become the written equivalent of a telling a joke and then shouting LAUGH immediately. LOL

See! It's just plain stupid.

I don't have a problem with people using it in response to something someone else has said but really if you need to whack a LOL at the end of a sentence the joke can't be that funny.

So please be selective with your use of smilies and LOLs as once upon a time people tried to be careful with their ! useage.

I thank you.