The Right Way To Laugh

LOL. LMAO. Hahaha. The Internet is full of different ways to laugh. So many in fact, that it’s hard to decipher the meaning of each. To the naive mind, they all mean the same thing, but in reality there’s a big difference between them all.

 

So let’s start with the most common way of laughing: LOL.

LOL literally means laughing out loud. However, it has lost its meaning over the years. How many times do people put LOL after their own statement? LOL is simply used to acknowledge that something should not be taken seriously, or is not being taken seriously. It is rarely used to express laughter.

Hahaha is another common way of laughing. This is older than the Internet, but is often used online. When something is slightly funny, it is appropriate to say “Hahaha.” What someone says “hahaha” they may or may not have actually laughed, but if they did, the laughter was minimal.

ROFL literally means “rolling on the floor laughing.” This is correctly used when you actually laughed. Did you actually roll on the floor? Nope. Not even close. But whatever was said did provoke some laughter.

LMAO means “laughing my ass off.” When you see someone use LMAO, you know that they thought what they read was really  funny. Of course, their bottom is still attached to their body, but the person did have a good laugh. Occasionally, an F will be inserted into the acronym standing for the F-bomb. This is only to intensify the saying, indicating that the person laughed really, really hard.

Now, I’m going to talk about the single ha. When you get that single ha, it’s a not a good sign. The person that said it was unamused, but replied with a ha because he or she knew what was said should have been funny. However, they did not think it was actually funny.

There’s also the evil “mwhaha.” This is used when someone finds something funny that shouldn’t be. For example, if someone sees another person getting hurt, and they find it funny, “mwhaha” would be an appropriate response because a typical person would feel sympathetic, or at least grossed out. The “mwhaha” is slightly psychotic,  but we all have our moment when we could use it.

Anyone that has been using the Internet over the past decade should now that there is a unique language that should be used online. Understanding it is important, and hopefully this post has made you more fluent in Internetz.