Tornado Alley (PROG)

[ergo sum]

Take “LOL,” or what is now more typically written as “lol.” As early internet slang, “LOL” meant “laughing out loud,” but then its definition softened, acquiring additional layers of meaning. The lowercase “lol” is still a “word in transition,” McCulloch says, signifying “amusement, irony and even passive aggression.” It can temper a statement that might otherwise sound confrontational (“what are you doing out so late lol”) or gently poke fun at someone (“good morning lol” to a friend who woke up at noon).
McCulloch is such a disarming writer — lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject — that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety. Emotions can be quickly and efficiently conveyed by the “sarcasm tilde” (“isn’t that ~special”) and “expressive lengthening” (“yesssss” and “bothhhh”). A lot of innuendo can be contained in the tiny emoji of an eggplant.
But being attuned to such fine gradations of meaning can make for extreme sensitivity, too. A Full Internet Person might read annoyance or anger into a sentence that ends with a period. I was surprised to learn that the dot-dot-dot of ellipsis in emails and texts, which I usually associated with a simple (and harmless) pause in thought, is “especially perilous.” Younger people indicate a simple pause with a line break or a new message; they “infer emotional meaning” from an ellipsis because they wonder what it’s doing there, and what it might be insinuating.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/books/review-because-internet-understanding-new-rules-language-gretchen-mcculloch.html?fallback=0&recId=1OPqBttdMB3pxqCCXqrdovKhWNG&locked=0&geoContinent=NA&geoRegion=CO&recAlloc=top_conversion&geoCountry=US&blockId=most-popular&imp_id=78393892&action=click&module=trending&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer