Lol.

For reasons that are a bit too complicated to go into, I've been spending a lot more time online lately. And clearly not spending much time at all writing stuff in here. I've ended up chatting with people in, well, chatrooms.

It's fascinating, especially the 'adult dating' ones. There's a bit of everything, comedy, pathos, rage, jealousy.. the works. I've even found myself getting caught up in some of the intruiges (Chatter A asks me to surreptitiously check up on chatter B, that sort of thing. Chatter C asks me to have a look at Chatter D's profile to see whether I think D is hot.)

Some people's profiles are mercifully short: "I want to meet someone [with these characteristics] for [some activity]". Others are almost a chronicle of hurt and heartbreak, and love-gone-wrong, as the person (usually a woman) describes the characteristics of people she doesn't want to meet, and you know that these are based on bitter experience. And then, often as a series of postscripts, she goes on to describe other people she doesn't want to meet too, and you can just tell this is based on recent experience. It has the feel of something being constructed in real time.

But the chatrooms get me. Every second sentence ends in 'lol'. Or, sometimes, 'pmsl'. I can understand using lol to soften the impact of a sentence that might otherwise risk being read as too harsh - tone's hard to convey. (I would never use lol myself in this way, naturellement, but I sympathise.) But it ends up on sentences that are at no risk of being misunderstood. It's like the rising inflection you often hear at the ened of sentences (especially in Australia, it's our gift to the world). I think the message it sends is "I'm pretty unsure of myself, so I'm going to put this lol marker on the end of the sentence so that if anyone disagrees I with it, I'm not putting myself on the line".

Someone in a chatroom yesterday took me to task (not surprisingly, I must come across as a really fusty and mean person) and said 'lol', 'pmsl' and 'ffs' were just easier than typing it all in full. Exactly. What sort of moron would type "laugh out loud" at the end of a sentence?