DOTI (downgrading of text initialisms)

[Geoffrey Steven Nathan]

I had a student say in a computational linguistics class that it was a perfect translation for Schadenfreude.

Geoffrey Nathan
C&IT Faculty Liaison & Professor of Linguistics
Wayne State University
Geoffnathan at wayne.edu

On Apr 30, 2013, at 3:23 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: DOTI (downgrading of text initialisms)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>>
>> John McWhorter has an article on the CNN site saying LOL can be
>> completely devoid of humor:
>> http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/30/opinion/mcwhorter-lol/index.html
>
> Anne Curzan recently made a similar point:
>
> ---
> http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/03/01/txtng-rules/
> LOL no longer means ‘laughing out loud’ (so the OED gets credit for
> including LOL in the third edition, but the definition is already out
> of date). To show laughter, EMC now often relies on “hahaha” (students
> tell me that you need at least three ha’s to show laughter if they are
> not capitalized). LOL is now a way to flag that a message is meant to
> be funny (similar to jk—‘just kidding’) or to signal irony. LOL can
> also be a way to acknowledge that a writer has received a text—a
> written version of a nod of the head and a smile (“a chuckle at most,”
> one student told me).
> ---
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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