People learned “lol” from their peers, in the social crucible of the internet, where words—and especially time-saving acronyms—are in all lowercase unless they’re emphatic. And while “lol” started out indicating laughter, it quickly became aspirational, a way of showing your appreciation of a joke or defusing a slightly awkward situation even if you didn’t technically laugh at it. As early as 2001, the linguist David Crystal was doubting how many lols were truly out loud, and as one widely shared Reddit post put it, “We should change ‘lol’ to ‘ne’ (nose exhale), because that’s all we really do
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