Chat Lingo Showdown: “haha” Versus “lol”
Even if the other person doesn’t hear you laugh or see you smiling, it’s important to show your appreciation for a joke or funny story. Many popular variations can be summarized into two types: hahaha simulated laughter, and LoL metaphorical laughter.
Both can act alone as a reaction or follow a funny sentence, as if you were laughing at your own joke. But what does your choice between haha (or hehehe, or hahaha ) and lol (or lmao, or lololol ) say about you?
Competition
ha ha
The standard way to portray laughter on the Internet. Sometimes accompanied by emoticons. Can be expanded to hahahaha on the scale of any joke.
laughing out loud
A newer, trendy lowercase version of the old standard spoken language LOL . While his cousin ROFL did not survive, LMAO continues to live.
Haha : we laugh at you, not at you
Haha tries to translate the reflective act of laughter into phonetics. For a while, this was the best option we had as the mod moved away from the AOL chats acronym and acronym. As recently as 2015, New Yorker Sarah Larson explored variations of haha and hehehe in detail , only with the disparaging mention of LOL as an “old term” that chatters don’t want to “resort to.”
But sometimes, ha ha , the awkward persistence in imitating laughter makes it a bad choice. This year, Kelly Konaboy of “Studs” (graduate Gawker) called it under the title “Men, you do not need to write a” ha-ha “at the end of statements.” Konaboy called haha the “safety blanket” that men use to appear relaxed and calm with women, but it actually makes them seem a little psychotic.
Michael Cera already used the awkward “haha” extensively in a 2013 Shouts & Murmurs piece called “My Man, Jeremy.” The fictional version of Michael responds to a random text from a stranger with the words “hahahaha, no problem – it happens.” … where are you at all? Which city do you like? Los Angeles? “He spends eight months harassing a stranger with increasingly messy messages. The piece contains 48 uses haha .
But haha is perfectly acceptable if used after something funny. Use HAHA, or even just capitalized HA , to bring some joy back into it, letting it know you really lost it.
A note on options: Ha means “It’s not really funny.” He means: “This is not entirely funny, and please reconsider your choice.”
lol : Now the word
Decades ago, LOL pioneered the BRB , OMG and IMHO Hall of Fame. People pronounced this word “LOL” as some kind of chemical formula. They argued about whether it was dishonest to write this when they were literally not laughing out loud.
But by the time LOLcats emerged in the mid-2000s, LOL was rhyming with ” funny” (or sometimes stretching ). And as it morphed from initialism to word, lol lost its capital letters.
In short, lol doesn’t mean laugh out loud. It can mean “I’m laughing,” but it also often means only “I’m surprised” or even just “I agree, this is funny.” You can liven it up with the words “I’m screaming” or “God, I’m dying.”
Unlike haha , lol recognizes the difference between signifier and signified. He is not trying to reproduce the sound of laughter; lol is its own sound. It becomes clear when someone expands it: lololol works like hahaha or haaa ; it does not mean “laugh out loud”.
Best of all, lol adds a touch of irony, worldly, detachment even amid genuine appreciation. Unlike haha , lol can mean ridicule, such as “lol nope,” or bitterness, such as “lol, nothing matters.”
Is there a downside to laughter? If now someone is trying to re-read this word over and over again, then this is the flip side of the coin. A word is only as good as the audience that accepts it, and if you are speaking to a hahaseti , your laugh may sound fussy, snobbish, “millennial,” or just AOL-y.
And don’t think that a laugh at the end of an unfunny text is better than haha .
Verdict:; laksdjf; l
At this particular cultural moment, while neither is a terrible choice, lol seems more expressive and natural than haha . His capacity for negative forms of laughter seems essential in our “lol everything sucks”, ?-worthy world.
But neither lol, haha no not deliver so much as pure and simple attack on the keyboard :; lkasdjf; l .
Hitting the keyboard does what, haha, it can’t: it translates the spontaneity of laughter into the spontaneity of the text. It’s organic, different every time ( ; klasjdf; lk ), and it’s as infinitely variable as real laughter. It alludes to cartoonish obscene words and can mean rage, shock, any outpouring of sudden overwhelming emotions.
The city dictionary calls this asdfghjkl , but a real bump on the keyboard will almost never result in those letters appearing in order. If you are going to do it, do it for real. If you want, let your fingers leave the main row, but do not hold the Shift key to insert any special characters, otherwise you will ruin the effect.
Keyboard layouts are popular with gamers, but they have their avid fans. Choire Sicha, a former editor of Gawker and the Awl, used the keyboard extensively both in public and in private. Sichi’s successor, John Herrman, called the result “annoyingly vague and therefore strong.” (It remains to be seen if Sicha will bring him to his new job as editor of the Times Style section.)
; Lkajsdf is the purest expression of shit loss and is as physically pleasing as its sound equivalent. Try. Let your fingers laugh.