lol – Possibly the most dangerous of all TLA’s (Three letter Acronyms) that blight modern day conversation. What does it mean? “Laughing out loud”. One of the primary lies told in any conversation online or via text is that the person in question is laughing out loud.

I remember when I first encountered this unspeakable demon’s monstrous powers. The year was 2001, I was thirteen years old, the birds were singing in the trees and I remember thinking to myself, “Ah, what a wonderful day”. I took to speaking to someone who had a webcam. It was a young lady, and I fancied myself as quite the wordsmith. “Hi, hows u?” she implores, intricately probing at the complexities of my current status of well being. I reply that I’m very well. In fact I say fantastic, and go on to elaborate somewhat further, hinting that my life at the moment is filled with its ups and downs, but the net feeling is one of wanton optimism. I wasn’t ready for the reply: “Lol.” She says. Lol. She was claiming to be laughing out loud. I could quite clearly see that she was not, in fact, laughing out loud. There was, actually, not even the slightest hint of a smile on her face. She was not angry, confused or desparately unhappy. Her face was blank. Nonetheless, “lol”, she said.

I simply couldn’t fathom it. How could she lie to my face like that? The innocence of my childhood was being stolen. The carpet of naivety on which I had trodden for my whole life was being pulled from under my feet. The granite cliffs of my ingenuousness were eroding in front of my eyes. The tree of my youthful ignorance was being felled. The ocean of… well that’s enough, but that day, I came close to losing my trust in mankind. “lol”, she had said. Lol. LOL?!

Since then, I have had one inexorable fact beaten into me by the barbed stick that is life experience: lol is a lie. Not only that, it completely stops a conversation in its tracks. It is anti-conversation. Pre-lol, a conversation is a world of opportunities; an apple tree bearing the immeasurable fruits of banter. Post-lol, the conversation is an ex-conversation. It is no more. It has expired.

It is an unutterable tragedy that we have to live every day confronted by the betrayal that is the word ‘lol’. I live in phobia of the day that it ghosts its way into the spoken word. Then, we really are f****d.