Thursday, May 10, 2007

"lol"?

Over at Ol' Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish, a mini-insurrection is brewing.

It has to do with Andrew's penchant for loquacity, and then some.

In an effort to cut down on the verbosity in some of his postings, Andy (I don't know him well enough to call him that, but he'll never read this, so...WTF) has decided to post a couple of paragraphs, then send his readers on to the complete posting through 'a "Continue reading ..." link to the full version.'

The response has been less than overwhelmingly positive. It seems as though most of us are too lazy to "hit the link(s)!" The complaints resulted in this from Andrew, "Screw you, guys. Seriously, I'm going to keep it but use it sparingly - when a post is more than two paragraphs long." (No doubt in my mind, the screwing is meant as a jocular metaphor.)

I sent TDD the following email under the subject of "...continue reading..." : Maybe you could be less verbose.
gene
(screw you back)
To which I appended a cutesy smiley face.

Imagine my surprise when I received this from "Andrew": "lol"

The question, dear virtually non-existant reader, is What does lol mean? Lots of luck? Lots of laughs? Look out, Loser?

And surely Andrew is too busy (at least I hope so) writing to respond to all the cutesies he receives during the day. So, did a factotum respond? Is it really Lots of luck, meaning, "Andrew, shorten? Edit? Cull? lol!"

Or not?

Keep writing, Andrew. You're a credit to us all.

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1 comment:

  1. Most common usage is as an abbreviation of "laughing out loud." (See UrbanDictionary.com: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lol)

    Also used when one has nothing meaningful or intelligent to say in reply.

    So goes the written language.

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