LOL

I love words. That's what I've been talking about this week. I just like reading and writing, even though I am not that great at grammar or spelling. The other day I had to fill out a questionnaire using pen and paper and it was so hard to have to rely on the spell check in my brain! Seriously, I am ever so grateful for the little red lines under my words that indicate that questionnaire is not spelled questionaire (I'm using a real life example here).

My love of words is probably why I am not a huge fan of texting abbreviations or initialisms. Although I do use them some, I am pretty old fashioned. I wrote a post about this once called textiquette. Times are changing though and these initialisms are becoming more acceptable. They are even starting to show up in the dictionary. I don't really know why. The should have a separate dictionary for acronyms because they are not really words, they are letters that represent several words. It could be called the all caps dictionary. But no one consulted me about this and so we are officially introducing several new acronyms into the Oxford dictionary such as LOL and OMG.

It was no more than 10 years ago I remember chatting with a couple of friends debating the meaning of the term LOL. One of them said it was laugh out loud. I said I thought it meant lots of love, and the other girl said we were both wrong and confidently declared that it stood for little old lady. After some research I found out that we were all right, and lots of luck could been thrown in there too. LOL began in the 1960's and did in fact mean little old lady, but for the current generation it obviously means laugh out loud and if you don't believe me you can look it up in the dictionary along with sexting and wassup. To be honest, it kind of irks me that misspellings and initialisms are making their way into the beautiful English language. I'll probably come around, I usually do (like with texting in general), but can't smiley faces be right side up? I drove past a car that someone had written on with shoe polish and it had a message followed by a colon and parenthesis, or in other words :). I totally understand using this emoticon when typing and maybe she was just trying to be cute, but my fear is that the next generation will not even know that smiley faces are not supposed to be sideways!!! I digress.

I am not trying to be a LOL, but does anyone else wonder if electronic communications will change the way we speak and write forever?