Spread From Written To Spoken Communication
LOL, ROFL, and other initialisms have crossed from computer-mediated communication to face-to-face communication. David Crystal—likening the introduction of LOL, ROFL, and others into spoken language in magnitude to the revolution of Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the 15th century—states that this is "a brand new variety of language evolving", invented by young people within five years, that "extend the range of the language, the expressiveness the richness of the language".
Geoffrey K. Pullum points out that even if interjections such as LOL and ROFL were to become very common in spoken English, their "total effect on language" would be "utterly trivial".
Conversely, a 2003 study of college students by Naomi Baron found that the use of these initialisms in computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically in instant messaging, was actually lower than she had expected. The students "used few abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons". The spelling was "reasonably good" and contractions were "not ubiquitous". Out of 2,185 transmissions, there were 90 initialisms in total, only 31 CMC-style abbreviations, and 49 emoticons. Out of the 90 initialisms, 76 were occurrences of LOL.
Read more about this topic: LOLOLOL
Famous quotes containing the words spread, written and/or spoken:
“A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)