LOL, OMG, WOW, TMI

This post touches an interesting phenomenon of words coming into the spoken language from the chat language. Such chat abbreviations as LOL, OMG, and TMI are pretty common in chat, as are TTYL, WTF, ROTFL and a few others. They vary in terms of how widespread they are and how universally understood they are. And that's an interesting science in itself: if you invent one (I saw a new one yesterday), and nobody knows what it means, but everyone's right by their phone, and can look it up instantly, will it become universally or even widely recognized? Only if everyone does look it up. Some like me might not.

On the other hand, how common is it really for people to just say L - O - L? It's getting more common. Maybe I can count the LOLs that I hear. SEE if these words are slipping into the oral lexicon. They are, after all, useful.

In our house we talk to the pets in Doge memes. So we say very very preciousness OMG or very very tailwag WOW....the interesting thing here is that to the Japanese, maybe not the woman who started them but many who made and used these memes, there wasn't much difference between OMG and WOW. They knew what each meant, but they didn't know what they abbreviated if anything. That's why WOW, which was never an abbreviation to begin with (that I know of) just fit right in as if it was one more three-letter word to stick in a Doge meme. many many interesting OMG.

Memes are a little between the written and spoken, being on social media and all. Where, between the two, I can't really say. But I like watching these little expressions travel across boundaries, and appear in new media. very very innovation WOW.