There is an episode in Curb Your Enthusiasm – episode 3, season 8 – in which Larry David cringes as a dinner party guest, a smartly dressed woman with big hair, acknowledges a joke by saying ‘LOL’ out loud. He calls it verbal texting, and it’s a no no in his book.
My 8 and 4 year old sons regularly say LOL, pronounced ‘loll’, and they haven’t even watched the aforementioned episode. They do watch a lot of YouTube, however, and consequently end up sounding much like Beavis and Butt-Head, as in “this playground totally sucks”, or “your butt stinks”.
As a mother, I often find myself both cringing at my sons’ speak and simultaneously berating myself for having become a parody of my own parents. Why can’t they say bottom? What is wrong with un-American English? There are so many perfectly good ways of referring to one’s rear end, after all. Must they say butt?
I can stomach the butts, if the truth be told. It’s OK, just, for ‘sick’ to mean ‘good’. But the transgression that irks Larry David, verbal texting, is a whole new breed of linguistic upset. To say LOL out loud is like impersonating an emoticon at the end of a sentence. It is like saying something funny and then flashing a cheeky semi-colonish wink. It is not cool. Except that it apparently is, in my son’s school playground.
I’m with Larry David , but I suspect that in this particular generational culture clash, my kids will get the last LOL.
Ariadne Birnberg 