lol update

I was kinda starting to miss lol, without quite knowing it, until a young linguist, Tanner S., took a look at the development of acronyms and initialisms in recent American English (unpublished manuscript). Some of the data on lol and related terms is pretty cool:

lol-worthy, lolable, lolacaust, lolcano, lollercoaster, lolrus
roflcopter, roflsaurus

A few compounds I knew about (lolcat, etc.) and I'd heard some of these blends (though I googled lolrus to see what parts of the story I might be missing). And I had heard it as a verb and as an interjection, but hadn't particularly thought about it as a noun:

A picture is worth 1000 lolz.

Gee, maybe it hasn't ruined the language after all.

Image from here.