"Laughing out loud" at sms language.
You know you’re hitting the big 40 when things like this start happening to you. Often, when I would SMS my brother, he would reply and end with “lol”. I pondered this for a while and thought: “Well, he’s getting very expressive with his love in his mobile messages. Often ends with ‘lots of love’. He’s also getting lazier with age — abbreviating lots of love to ‘lol’.” And I let it go.
Then one day a senior PR executive ended an SMS message with “lol”. Now that’s when I got suspicious. Would senior PR people be so affectionate with senior-ish journalists? It seemed decidedly odd to me.
So, when my sister-in-law in Melbourne, in response to one of my pieces sent by email, answered with this inexplicable “lol”, I finally asked her what she meant. Was she saying “lots of love” in response to a piece about mobile phones in aeroplanes? And that’s when the mystery finally cleared up. “You are mad”, she said, “It’s ‘laughing out loud’.”
Well, you live and learn. Now, I spend a fair amount of time chatting online with my friends, colleagues and contacts — especially those overseas. So, the other day I used that “lol” with someone who I thought would certainly not have a clue (not only is he well past 40, he’s even more remotely connected with the world at large than I am).
When he failed to answer for a few seconds, I panicked and explained that it wasn’t “lots of love”, in case he thought I was saying something I had never dared to express in person, and that it was “laughing out loud”. “I know”, he replied, “I was just trying to get over the shock of you using it!”
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He went on — to my utter shock — to offer a few more insights or lessons into SMS and chat language that I had so far missed. “MOS” (an important one for me with my eight-year-old, who’s getting alarmingly Internet-savvy) means “Mom over shoulder”. “LMAO” is crude and stands for “laughing my ass off”. “BRB” is “be right back” (in the middle of a chat, for instance). A nicer one than MOS, however, is “BIS”, which is “boss is watching” — except that the purpose is kind of defeated if you write it and the boss is indeed watching.
To see whether everyone else was up to date or as clueless as I am, I did a random search on the Net and came across not only an “A to Z” dictionary on SMS and chat language, but also the Wikipedia introduction to and description of the whole concept. This explains that “This type of language does not always obey or follow standard English grammar” (you can say that again).
It goes on to explain that “the words used in the writing system can’t be found in standard dictionaries”, and that “there are no standard rules for writing SMS languages. It says that a lot of words can also be shortened, such as “text”, which becomes “txt”. Words can also be combined with numbers to make them shorter, such as “later”, or “l8r”.
Wikipedia also tells us that Red Hot Chilli Peppers (the band) becomes “RHCP”, although I for the life of me couldn’t see that many occasions to use it and for it to justify an abbreviation. Whatever anyone may say in its defence, some of this language certainly borders on the ridiculous. Take for instance ICTYBTIHTKY (“I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you”) or TIMTOWTDI (“There is more than one way to do it”)!
I mean, what would you think if someone said this to you in a message!
I was also quite amused to find “WYMM”, which incidentally is “Will you marry me?” Now, that struck me as quite unusual. I would think twice if I was proposed to in this manner.
Here I must admit that I have also never managed to make those smiley/sad faces to express my emotions over mobile messages — though I have now learnt to deal with them with equanimity. For someone who’s always liked the tone of voice, it took me a while to figure out and get used to invitations, arguments, hunger, anger, disgust, hatred and virtually any possible emotion being expressed through these symbols.
In fact, often now I get only a smile, a happy face or a sad face as a reply and I am learning to deal with that too. This took me a while, as I would often send a long-winded message and stare at some combination of symbols that I received in reply. I explained it away by thinking that perhaps being in the business of words makes one uneconomical with them.
Is it that I just haven’t managed to keep up with the times? Will I see a day when the old Oxford English Dictionary has to move aside and relinquish its top slot to a TWILD (“The With-It Language Dictionary”)?
It does seem possible. And I and people like me WTH — “will try harder”. Or on the other hand, end up BMHATW — “banging my head against the wall”.