I Did It For The LULZ!

So, recently one of my cousins wrote on his Facebook about the hacker group ANONYMOUS. What he was referring to was when they hacked an FBI website. This website the FBI created and asked anyone who could hack it, and that if they could the FBI would pay them a large sum of money and give them a job. ANONYMOUS hacked it and wrote "I did it for the LULZ", meaning they only hacked it for kicks and didn't want the money or the job. My cousin pointed out in his posting that the "LULZ" didn't have anything to do with LOL cats.

At first, I thought he was simply making an odd observation. But it then occurred to me that he is of the generation that has accepted "lol" as a legitimate word, and does not quite understand it's etymology. 

I was about 13 when "lol" was being used frequently on IM. I actually remember when I first came across this acronym I had to ask what it meant. It wasn't until I was about 15 that I heard people people say in everyday conversation "l-o-l" (i.e. spelling it out) And it wasn't until I was about 19 when I heard people simply saying "lol" (i.e. as in "lull"). He's about 14 years old (I think), which means he was about 3 years old when that term was beginning to gain momentum in usage.

For someone who studies word roots, etymology, and linguistics for kicks (or for the lols), I simply find this amazing. This is the birth of an actual word, no matter the vulgarity. Who knows how long that word may survive until found archaic or is corrupted (as lulz is a corruption of lols). And for someone who spends a good chuck of his research dedicated to the origin of things (namely architecture and the architect), it is amazing to actually experience the origin of something as simple as a word, rather than just reading about it in the dictionary. And just so we are clear here, on March 24th, 2011 the term "lol" was added into the Oxford Dictionary. Welcome to the Internet Meme generation. Get used to it Baby Boomers.

I particularly enjoy their reference of a possessed man (I suppose a "trolled" or "hacked" man) in Mark 5 : 9...