Men, You Don’t Have To Write “Haha” At The End Of Statements

Following up on this post last week, here’s an excerpt from this article:

Here is an example of what I’m talking about:

Person 1: What’s up?
Man: Just at home haha

Hm? Excuse me? Hm, what? That you are at home is not funny. That you are at home is just a fact that is normal and fine. I understand you want to appear chill and don’t have the tools to appear chill in text so you have resorted to punctuating your statement with the onomatopoeia used for when something is funny but I’m going to have to give you this advice as a friend and confidant: don’t. 🙂

Here is another example:

Person 1: Did you have a good weekend?
Man: Yeah I went to the beach haha

Laugh and the World Laughs With You. Type ‘Ha,’ Not So Much.

Excerpt from this article:

It was early in our courtship that I realized the guy I was dating, with whom I now cohabit, wasn’t laughing at my jokes. Well actually, he may have been laughing at my jokes, and in fact I thought he was laughing at my jokes, because he consistently responded with boisterous HAHAHAs to my humorous text messages.

It was flattering. Except when I made a joke that clearly wasn’t that funny — perhaps only worthy of a single ha — and suddenly it dawned on me that his typical HAHAHA reply (that’s three HAs, no spaces, all caps) was formulaic. Which could mean only one thing: This was not indicative of an actual measurement of laughter, but merely of the autocorrect function on his phone that had memorized a HA sequence. I was the idiot thinking I was hilarious and he was just sooo into me.

…

Take hahaha, which we’ll call basic laughter. It’s actually anything but basic, with the ability to shorten (haha), lengthen (hahahahahaha), capitalize (HAHAHA), punctuate (Ha!), elongate (Haaaaaaaaa), or replace with an “e” (hehe) — though, realtalk, The New Yorker may have called hehehe a “younger person’s e-laugh,” but ask any actual young person today and his or her response is likely to be “ew.” (Heh, however, is acceptable.)

Then of course there is LOL, for “laugh out loud,” which actually means the opposite, because nobody using LOL has actually laughed out loud since at least 2015. “It’s like saying ‘k,’” said Sharon Attia, a 22-year-old college senior, noting that a single ha is also pretty much the equivalent to giving someone your best resting bitch face.

Variations to LOL (or lol, as it may be) include the phonetic “lul,” or “the cool girl’s el-oh-el,” as Ms. Attia described it, which is “like a blase-inspired ‘lol’ — as if I am acknowledging that this is humorous but do you really have nothing better to do than text me about it?” There is also Lollerskates, lollercoaster, loltastic, words that are “fantastically creative,” as the linguist Gretchen McCulloch has written, but “ring vintage early 2000s.” Another expansion, she noted, is lolz or lulz — “but it’s more of a noun than an emotive response,” as in “so many lulz” (pronounced “lawlz”).

Why Do Older People Love Facebook? Let’s Ask My Dad

Excerpt from this article (and there’s a cute story at the end about a grandpa who comments LOL on everything because he thinks it means “lots of love”):

…He successfully avoided social media for years. But after returning home to Indiana from my wedding a couple of months ago, he wanted to be better at keeping in touch with family and with the friends he remembers from my childhood. He told me over Facebook chat (naturally) that his curiosity about what others were up to was his main motivator in finally learning to navigate Facebook.

Now, like the rest of us, he’s hooked. He’s had a ball wishing happy birthday to my friends, commenting on our status updates and sharing his own life’s highlights. He still signs comments with his initials, but he’s learning. He has even joined a Facebook group for local music enthusiasts, sharing memories about his favorite concert (The Beatles in 1964) and photos of his drum set.

“Initially, I think I viewed it as something ‘newfangled’ that only the younger computer-generation used,” he said. “Then, like probably everybody, I started to become hooked as I saw just how expansive it is, and how much it seems to literally touch so many lives.”

The findings might not come as any surprise to countless members of the digital-savvy generations who have watched (and cringed) as their parents fell in love with Facebook, but researchers say the online lives of older adults, who are a part of the fastest-growing demographic on social media, are much more mysterious than the much-scrutinized behaviors of younger generations.

OMG! The Hyperbole of Internet-Speak

OMG literally dying, illustration by Tiffany Ford

Excerpt from this article:

“It’s almost like ‘dying’ has become a filler for anytime anyone says anything remotely entertaining,” she said. “Like, if what you’re saying won’t legitimately put me to sleep, I respond with, ‘OMG dying.’”

R.I.P. to the understatement. Welcome to death by Internet hyperbole, the latest example of the overly dramatic, forcibly emotive, truncated, simplistic and frequently absurd ways chosen to express emotion in the Internet age (or sometimes feign it).

Other examples: THIS (for when a thing is so awesome you are at a loss for how to describe it); feeeeeels (for something that gives you multiple feelings); unreal!!!! (for when a thing is totally believable and only mildly amusing); yassssss (because “yes” will no longer do); -est (greatest, prettiest, cutest, funniest) EVER, which now applies to virtually all things; and “I can’t even,” for when something leaves you so emotive that you simply cannot even explain yourself.

There’s also a;lsdkjfa;lsdkgjs; meaning “I’m so excited/angry/speechless that all I can do is literally slam my hands/head/body against the keyboard” (thus producing a series of gibberish that usually involves the letters a, s, d and k).

“I use ‘I can’t even’ whenever I talk about babies or puppies, or sometimes couples, but not like couples our age, but older couples like my parents…”

…

“‘Literally dying’ has become, like, the new LOL,” she said, referring to the acronym for “laugh out loud,” which, of course, if you know literally anything about Internet speech, means precisely the opposite.

 

RIP LOL

Excerpt from this article:

Language evolves at break neck speed on the internet; what’s cool one minute is lame by the next. Case in point: “LOL” is dying. A Facebook report claims that LOL is now one of the least popular ways to express laughter on the social network. Why? Probably because of mom.

The waning popularity of LOL correlates with aging demographics. In other words, only old people are using LOL these days, presumably because it was popular in the internet’s early days but is now falling out fashion as emoji becomes the universal language of youths. However, variations of “haha” and “hehe” are still the most popular expressions of laughter.

Related – see also “A Better Laugh for Dating Apps”

A Better Laugh for Dating Apps

Excerpt from this article:

Are your “ha has” feeling womp womp these days? Your triple bar axles — “hahah” — a little fake? Have you always hated “LOL” because nine times out of ten it felt like a lie? And does your own employment of the “cry laughing” emoji make you want stab your thigh with a Sriracha-covered spork?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the above questions, then you have digital laughter fatigue.

DLF typically occurs in those who use more than one dating app. Multiple profiles (Bumble, Happn, Hinge, WebbedToeWeb, etc.) mean multiple polite conversations about such mundane pleasantries as: the weather, work, day of the week, evening plans, and whether or not you have any “fun” weekend plans. These benign chit-chat starters are meant to ease strangers into friendship. The problem, however, is they often result in a dead end of flat laughter.

 …Luckily, there’s a solution to the snooze-fest: the exclamation point!  You read right. It’s minimal, classic, and easy to use. It’s also more honest.  Someone’s dumb joke only warrents a “ha”? Use an exclamation point! Like this: !

 …There’s no stopping the exclamation point. It eliminates characters (great for Twitter!), it’s slightly elusive (you don’t give up real laughs that easy, bud!) and autocorrect can’t fuck up your cool-factor with a violently unwarranted all-caps dramatization.