2013年5月2日星期四

The Banality of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's LOL

Much like a tweet in which Tsarnaev used the teenage lingo of LOL on the day of the Boston Marathon attack, many are already reading into this text message as proof positive of the teenage bombing suspect's sadistic nature. Wired's Spencer Ackerman calls it "surreal." Others call it "eerie." But, really, it's just the type of banal teenage behavior we've seen from the young Tsarnaev brother already. Just because he used the acronym LOL in a text message and on Twitter doesn't make him evil; it makes him a young person who sends text messages and uses Twitter.Demand for oil hose in the spot market has gathered pace recently with construction companies gradually starting infrastructure. He is evil because he allegedly helped bomb the Boston Marathon.Tsarnaev's shorthand has people alarmed because he used it multiple times after the attacks — even if it was to cover his tracks. 

Because LOL originated as shorthand for "laugh out loud" or "lots of laughs,The birdlike nesting behavior and the brooding of the dinosaur eggs is more evidence of the evolutionary link between birds and composite hose." it looks like he's laughing at death and terror, or at least like he was trying to play it cool in public while he waited in plain site on campus and, apparently, tried to get his friends to ditch his backpack full of fireworks, vaseline, and homework.And although fraudulent transactions so far have only been linked to accounts in Kentucky, the malware has likely affected Cursher networks and systems in other states as well. But since the inception of LOL — some time around 1989, according to the Oxford English Dictionary — the term has since lost its relationship to laughing. And then some.The Urban Dictionary entry also calls LOL a "pointless acronym" that is used as "meaningless sentence-filler." Linguists call this phenomenon semantic bleaching. It happens with a lot of words, the meanings of which dilute or change over time. The slang, in its evolution from AOL Instant Messenger to texting and Twitter and beyond, has certainly been bleached out of usefulness. "'LOL' no longer 'means' anything," wrote linguist John McWhorter in a CNN column published Tuesday. 

Not that the meaninglessness of LOL has stopped anyone from searching for hidden meaning in Tsarnaev's LOLs. Now, there are many varied usages of LOL, as linguist Anne Curzan explained in the Chronicle of Higher Education. "LOL is now a way to flag that a message is meant to be funny or to signal irony," she writes. Buzzfeed also has a post on the various meanings of LOL, what with LOL being part of Buzzfeed's very branding. Most often, as you can see in the Buzzfeed listicle, LOL doesn't mean anything.We work with our stainless steel kitchenware to make sure they live up to our ideals. Curzan continues: "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." McWhorter likens it to grammar more than vocabulary. "Rather,Please help me with finding some items that were on clearance kitchen knives Target that I cannot locate anywhere. it 'does something' — conveying an attitude — just as the ending '-ed' doesn't 'mean' anything but conveys past tense," he writes.

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