I just finally found out what “ROTFLMAO” means yesterday. Evidently it means “Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off.” I guess LOL wasn’t cutting it for some people. They felt they needed to create A New Unpronounceable Acronym For A Phrase That Wasn’t Exactly Ubiquitous In The First Place And Couldn’t Possibly Be True Anyway (ANUAFAPTWEUITFPACPBTA, if you need to use that phrase with some regularity and can’t be bothered to type it out every time.) Why can’t it be true? Because if you were really rolling on the floor laughing your ass off you wouldn’t be able to type while you were doing it – the use of the verb form “rolling” means you’re doing it right now. And even if you just got finished rolling on the floor and laughing your ass off, you probably wouldn’t be typing it because the second you sat down at the keyboard to begin typing, you would let out a horrific yelp of pain as you discovered that you NO LONGER HAD AN ASS to cushion the impact. The acronym for Letting Out A Horrific Yelp Of Pain Because I No Longer Have An Ass is: LOAHYOPBINLHAA. Feel free to use that one too.
The only time I really hear LOL spoken out loud is when people are pointing out how inane online chat can be. I never really hear “ROTFLMAO” spoken out loud, probably because a.) it’s nowhere near as popular as LOL, and b.)nobody knows how to pronounce it. Which I’m glad for. The last thing I need is to hear people start speaking in long strings of mostly consonants that abbreviate trite little sayings. The only thing worse would be if people started speaking in emoticons:
“LOAHYOPBINLHAA! Winking smiley face. *Hugs!*"
The one that really annoys me is IMHO. Which you would think at first glance means I'm a Ho - but no it means In My Humble Opinion. Whatever, if your opinion is so humble - keep it to yourself!
Posted by: moira at December 12, 2005 05:09 PMyou're just devastatingly attractive right now, i hope you know. semi-colon close parens.
have you seen this LOL? i thought it was extra interesting, taking the idea of something that came from writing on computers, and then - what if it had evolved from handwritten letters, instead?
Posted by: anne at December 12, 2005 11:49 PMMoira: Now that you mention it, there does need to be an abbreviation for the common phrase "I am a ho." However, when I see IMHO, it always makes me think IHOP.
Anne: And this is why the spoken form will never catch on: Written out, that's a perfectly nice compliment (thanks! colon close parentheses), but out loud the awkward placement of the word "colon" just kills the mood.
Posted by: flamingbanjo at December 13, 2005 10:05 AMRemember, you can't spell “ROTFLMAO” without Mao!
Now I need an acronym that incorporates Kropotkin.
Posted by: David Grenier at December 13, 2005 02:05 PM