Typing and texting have done wonders for the art of abbreviation, as even the Oxford English Dictionary has been forced to acknowledge. In March 2011 the English language’s dictionary of record selected for publication “a number of noteworthy initialisms” of which two should bring particular delight to digital eyes: OMG (“Oh my God,” first recorded, amazingly enough, in a 1917 letter from a British admiral to Winston Churchill) and LOL (“laughing out loud,” first recorded in the mid-1980s on a Canadian online Bulletin Board System, courtesy of one Wayne Pearson), six letters which between them summarize much of the emotional flavor of current casual typed communications.23
An initialism like LOL is distinct from an acronym like Scuba (which stands for “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus”) because it creates not a new word as such, but a collection of capital letters that function as a single timesaving unit.
Soldiers writing home in the Second World War popularized such pre-digital initialisms as SWALK (Sealed with a Loving Kiss), MALAYA (My Ardent Lips Await Your Arrival), and the rather more forward BURMA (Be Upstairs Ready My Angel). Text messages, emails, and online chat have, however, ushered in a whole new level of reference and self-reference of which it’s only possible to scratch the surface here, but which is characterized above all by the steady accretion of letters.
Consider an early enhanced version of LOL, for when things get really amusing: ROFL (“rolling on the floor laughing”). In an inexorable process of escalation, this soon gained its own superior variant, ROFLMAO (“rolling on the floor laughing my ass off”)—onto which those wanting to indicate bored amusement with the whole business of online initialisms sometimes graft three further letters to make ROFLMAOBBQ (“rolling on the floor laughing my ass off barbecue”). Its ridiculousness is a large part of the point, alongside the need to differentiate one’s own feelings from mere everyday LOLers; see also ROFLMAOASOFBS, for “rolling on the floor laughing my ass off at someone’s Facebook status,” and countless similar variations.
Originally typed in order to convey emotional states, LOL and its countless relatives have today become sufficiently accepted to start counting as conversational words in their own right, thus blurring their way ever closer toward the status of full acronyms. “Lol” is usually spoken to rhyme with “doll,” accompanied by some kind of ironic facial expression. Similarly, the explanation that you’re doing something “for the LOLs” or “for the lulz” has become a global shorthand for doing something stupid for its own sake.
There are also rich international pickings to be had here. French has its own variant, MDR, standing for mort de rire or “dying of laughter”; while Spanish tends to go for “jajaja” (pronounced close to “hahaha” in English) or “jejeje” (in English, “hehehe”). In Thailand, typing “555” also reads approximately out loud as “hahaha,” the Thai word for five being ha; while Swedes go for “asg,” an abbreviation of the Swedish word asgarv, or “roars of laughter.”
In the Philippines, meanwhile, an entire youth culture has drawn its name from these abbreviations: the jejemons, a term derived from a combination of the Spanish version of LOL, jejeje, with the abbreviation of the word monster into “mon.”
Jejemons epitomize a particular contemporary cultural strand: the use of sociolects (language varieties restricted to particular social groups) based on text messages that infuse English and international terms with local words. “iMiszqcKyuH” means, for example, “I miss you,” via an alchemical mix of phonetic English, deliberately reordered and mixed case letters, and a general desire to be as incomprehensible to outsiders as possible.