Nerd jokes have become the official mainstream humor. Recently, MIT had it’s first ROFLCon where you could find who’s who of the Internet and accidents masters of the viral world.
In a previous post, I sort of lamented about the silliness of Internet memes and was hoping it will evolve beyond the trivial. But it seems unlikely to happen. Or rather, even if we have intelligent virals going around, we will also have tons of fun and silly odd ball stuff dominating the Internet.
Or how else would you explain this list.
This made me think about the origin of LOLanguage. Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be much information regarding that, and even Wikipedia cites a vague source – Usenet.
Abbreviating phrases is an old phenomena and it doesn’t surprise anyone as to how LOL predominantly stands for Laughing Out Loud. But what’s surprising is the tremendous sub culture it has created.
At the ROFLCon, the men behind the I Can Haz Cheezburger had some interesting things to say, some highlights:
Cats attract girls to the internet. lolcode contributors are 80% male. I can has cheezburger submitters are about ~%60 female.
Cheez has a staff of 8 people.
LOLCats doesn’t help you get dates. {Shocker, I know!}.
Lastly, as I always suspected, LOLanguage started with SMS / Text Messaging.
I started thinking about this and had a slightly nagging feeling for a while now…I kinda felt I have somehow read this funny/silly LOLs before, but I just couldn’t put my finger to it…till I went all the way back to Dickens’ world in The Pickwick Papers. Without further ado, here’s Samuel Weller with his colorful metaphor when he finds someone has marked their coach with Pickwick’s name and Moses before it,
“…vich I call addin’ insult to injury, as the parrot said ven they not only took him from his native land, but made him talk the English Language arterwards.”
That, ladies and gentleman is the world’s first LOL*.
*As far as i know, Of course.
Catcher In The Rye 