Even someone as unhip as I knows that LOL means laughing out loud. When I saw people use LOLOL, I thought it was just a way to put an exclamation mark on it, and I tended to think it was silly. That theory was confirmed when I saw people using LOLOLOLOL, and such.
But LOLOL actually stands for “lots of laughing out loud.”
I feel better now.
I’m pretty sure for most people it really does mean “LOL with emphasis”, a la “Verily, verily.”
The one that gets me is the new trend to elongate the wrong part of a word for emphasis. If someone wants to write “All the time,” but drag out the word “time” to imitate someone dragging it out in speech for emphasis, you’d think they should write, “All the tiiiiime,” right?
But no. Anyone born after about 1985 now writes, “All the timeeeee.” It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard.
I’m not sure you weren’t right the first time. This kind of feels like somebody made up a back-initialism to justify what people were already doing..
I remember needing a name for an algorithm once in a paper, and named it after a character in a Japanese detective show I was watching– that it was the same name as the cute waitress at the restaurant near my apartment in London was a complete coincidence. Then I had to spend time trying to figure out what every letter stood for, and in the end had to resort to making up a Greek neologism for the “O”.. good times, good times.