Talk:LOL

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In Dutch, the word 'lul' is an originally very course, but slowly gaining mainstream word for the male member. Given that swearing in Dutch is primarily genital (as opposed to anal), this gives a very different tone to the 'u' forms of the LOL acronym. 178.237.74.251 (talk) 17:59, 2 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

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Please change the face-to-face link in the introduction to face-to-face (as was likely intended), or simply remove the link. DominoPivot (talk) 18:57, 17 August 2023 (UTC)Reply

 Done Troutfarm27 ^(Talk) 18:58, 17 August 2023 (UTC)Reply

User:JPxG added this strange choice of example to the article's history section in 2020 and has restored it three times since then.

Why is it a better example image than a more relevant shot of someone laughing while at a computer in the 2010s? Belbury (talk) 21:41, 16 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

I reverted their edit on the basis that I don't think an image of a historical figure laughing out loud is of any relevance to an article about the initialism 'LOL'. That image is not of someone 'LOLing'; it's of someone laughing out loud. The image of the person laughing out loud in a computer lab is far more relevant because the initialism is primarily used when communicating using computers – in fact, it's entirely possible that the person depicted could have subsequently typed 'LOL'. Even if they didn't, the link is clear.

JPxG re-reverted my edit with the summary This IS the "old image" -- it was in the article for several years and was removed without explanation very recently (in reference to my Old image was significantly better [...], and apparently ignoring the justification that followed). This is not an adequate reason for enforcing the use of an image that others clearly oppose: that a poor choice of image was used for a long time does not mean a poor choice of image must remain.

I have replaced the image (again), and hope that JPxG engages here before changing it back (again). Pink Bee (talk) 18:02, 17 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

I mean, why would there be a photo of anything, in any article? It illustrates the thing we are talking about.

I created this file by cropping it from a larger image, some years ago, while I was going through a very large quantity of public-domain photos from presidential photographers of the 1960s and 1970s (which yielded a good number of photographs of people who otherwise didn't have any). Among these were some others, like incidental photographs of cities from decades past, which I would add to their articles. This one I put here, and in another article about five years ago. Most of them I have since forgotten about, except for this one, which I see every once in a while because people screencapped it and use it as a meme on other sites.

First:

The "history" section of the article talks about the late 20th century, at which point the acronym was created, prior to not existing. Nobody loled in the 1960s, but this was the thing they did before loling. It's the referent of the word. Likewise, we might expect the article on cars to have a picture of some previous thing analogous to a car. Indeed, in History of the automobile, we have File:Trevithick Road Loco 01.jpg, a photograph of a steam locomotive fitted with flat-profile wheels which is not a car in any modern sense. In Aircraft we have File:Aviation (Nouveaau Larousse,c. 1900) DSCN2832.jpg, a large assemblage of devices from the 19th century which are not aircraft (e.g. none of them worked).

Must these be removed, because they are not aircraft, and the aircraft article must only have images of aircraft?

Second:

The purpose of illustration is to assist the article in conveying the thing it talks about. It's an illustration that people have commented on elsewhere on the WWW. Inasmuch as the article's subject is Internet culture, must we to go out of our way to deliberately choose something uninteresting?

jp×g🗯️ 15:12, 22 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

We should use images which are significant and relevant. Using strange, out of place examples so that readers might take to social media to point out a "random ass richard nixon insert" doesn't seem like something Wikipedia should be aspiring to. Belbury (talk) 10:51, 23 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

I think it is worth to mention Basshunter album LOL <(^^,)> which is named after LOL (reference). Eurohunter (talk) 21:27, 10 August 2025 (UTC)Reply

XD is also used in Spainish Speaking countries,especially on social media as a replacement for jajajajajaja. 173.235.255.87 (talk) 12:57, 2 October 2025 (UTC)Reply