[As a “word” guy, these text abbreviations are even more annoying than emojis. I know, this is just me sounding like a grumpy old Silverback, but that’s what I am. Don’t take shortcuts with the language. If you do, pretty soon we will all sound the same. This is about humor, but it’s not very funny. SB SM]
https://granta.com/lol-im-trying-to-tell-you-how-it-feels-for-me
Lol … I’m trying to tell you how it feels for me
Harriet Armstrong
When I searched my phone for texts I’d sent with ‘lol’ in them, there were thousands. Most of them were just ‘lol’ by itself, or ‘lol ok’, ‘lol no’ or ‘lol hahaha’, and very few of these messages had anything to do with laughter or jokes. ‘For like two years at uni I wrote one shite poem per week lol.’ ‘I’m genuinely so sorry lol I shouldn’t have said anything.’ ‘Lol I was mega lonely hahahaha.’
I realised that I had sent a lot of messages like these while actively crying. A few years ago, crying hard, quite drunk, after a complicated night with my friend A., I sent him a text that said, ‘lmaooo ok I’m on the bus absolutely LOLLING at my bad personality.’ Shortly afterwards I tried to write a story inspired by that moment of absolutely lolling on the bus. ‘The bus was trapped inside the night’s blue walls, the blue walls wet and starless, pressing down upon the roof, pressing the doors in. My love for him felt totally clear and ancient. It felt like the oldest and most sacred thing inside my life . . .’
My story was melodramatic, and the admission that I was ‘absolutely LOLLING at my bad personality’ was insincere and dumb. But what was I trying to communicate by telling A. that I was laughing, while simultaneously writing that my love for him felt clear and ancient in between the wet walls of the blue and starless night? I guess the truth was something more generic, some more basic combination of sadness, embarrassment and longing, more uncomfortable and also more boring than either ‘my love for him felt totally clear and ancient’ or ‘lmaooo ok I’m on the bus absolutely LOLLING at my bad personality’.
Like an exclamation mark, which adds something jovial and upbeat to a statement, ‘lol’ indicates that a sentence should be taken less seriously – but this often feels like a sort of mutually understood but unacknowledged mask. Often ‘lol’ conveys a near-explicit desperation to connect. Both my ‘bad personality’ text and that description of experiencing ancient sacred love on the bus are pretty transparent efforts to express something in a way that encourages empathy from the recipient or reader. The ‘lol’ is a way of asking for something – attention, reassurance, care or even love – while pretending not to ask for anything. Reading through my texts, the tone eventually starts to seem a bit manipulative. ‘Lol I’m literally the most boring woman in the world and you’re so interesting charming funny etc LOL.’ ‘Btw, you don’t have to respond to these texts lol, but you can?’
I started feeling horrified by the thousands of times I had written ‘lol’ in messages to my friends. I googled ‘lol semiotics’ and ‘lol google scholar’, and found that basically every article, essay, Reddit post and even the Google AI overview described ‘lol’ as a tool for social bonding. The AI overview said that ‘lol’ indicates ‘a shared context of interpretation’ and gave some examples of ‘lol’ texts that do so: ‘lol I’m doing homework,’ ‘lol I’m bored,’ ‘lol it’s cold.’ Those texts aren’t supposed to be funny. What they do is imply a mutual understanding of the feeling or experience of something. We both know what it’s like to do homework. We both know how boredom feels. We both know what it means to be cold, out here, wherever we both are or have been.
This is what I mean when I say ‘lol’ sometimes. ‘Lol I love that song too.’ ‘Lol you’re on the train now? Is it busy?’ ‘Lol yes come over!’ This sort of ‘lol’ – less abjectly emotional than when I told my friend I was lolling on the bus about my bad personality – is soft and open, and somehow restrained. I am saying that, for some reason, this is important to me, but I don’t want to burden you or make things heavy. I just want to tell you what it’s like for me and to know what it is like for you.
I thought of the ending of Ben Lerner’s 10:04: ‘I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.’ Maybe the best ‘lol’ texts do something like that: they speak to something which might be complex, or go unspoken for whatever reason, and they acknowledge that context without needing to explain it. They neither deflect nor fully disclose; they don’t need to, because both the sender and the recipient understand it all already. ‘Lol yes of course I know.’
‘I was lolling and looking at you’ is one of the few texts on my phone that describes a moment of actual, interpersonal laughter. I sent it to A. a few months ago, after we’d been at the pub with a big group of mutual acquaintances. One of our mutual acquaintances was saying something strange, and I was looking at A. because I knew what he was thinking – an obvious thought that probably everyone was thinking: what the mutual acquaintance was saying seemed strange, somehow rude, and that the fact of this person saying this strange, rude thing was funny. I was looking at A. because I wanted to make eye contact and see him trying not to laugh, and have him see me doing the same, and for us both to know exactly what the other person was thinking. I wanted to make eye contact with A. specifically because I wanted to feel a special, private understanding – to feel it blatantly, and in public. I’m always wanting to perceive the secret publicly with A. He didn’t look, and so afterwards, once I was home, I texted ‘I was lolling and looking at you,’ which is what all the ‘lol’ texts are doing – looking at you, hoping you look back and we can lol together, but it’s okay if you don’t and if we can’t, it’s totally fine, but lol I’m crying rn hahahaha lol please come over!
Image © Europeana