Puzzle Description:

Little old lady

#1: Web Paint-By-Number Robot (webpbn) on Aug 10, 2018

Blotted clues changed by mootpoint

But very straight.

LOL!

Blots made it a bit of a challenge, but great image.

She looks just like the old lady, all bent over went in to her doctor's office, and came out standing straight and proud, and her husband says, "It's a miracle! What a difference! How on Earth did he manage that?"

"He gave me a longer cane."

ROFL!

I like her!

This reminds me of the woman whose best friend's husband died suddenly, and she texted her "I heard the news. LOL!"

Her daughter was horrified at the callousness of her mom, who sheepishly explained she thought LOL meant Lots of Love ...

It definitely gets used to mean that, too.

When I was a young adult, I had a friend who I didn't know very well whose mom for some reason started mailing me a lot of handwritten letters and recipes. In the letters, she wrote LOL a lot. I understood LOL to mean "laughing out loud," but it didn't seem like that was what she meant by it -- she wasn't a laughing-at-people person. So the whole thing was baffling. At the time I guessed that she meant Lots Of Love. That was baffling too, since I barely knew her family, so it seemed overly familiar for her to be sending me love. But as far as I can tell, she was just a very kind and generous person, and also maybe happy to have found a young adult who liked to cook. Anyway, she's been gone for years now, so we will never know. I always wondered what she expected of me. Should I have sent her recipes? Written letters? Sent her my love when I barely knew her? It was unclear.

More recently, in an online forum, I saw a young adult contradict someone and then write "LOL." I replied that it was fine to disagree about the facts, but that it wasn't okay to laugh at people's mistakes. She said that her generation uses LOL as a way to soften what they are saying, kind of like when she is talking in person she might giggle a bit as she says something, to soften it. That was new to me! I think it is very hard to differentiate the LOL of laughing at someone from the LOL of using it to soften what you are saying.

I think some people use it as “ha ha” meaning psych or just kidding.

Exactly! That's why I found it so startling when the person in the online forum used it to soften her words. Looking at just plain text online, without any cues from tone of voice or body language, it's impossible to tell whether that's an LOL that is intended as softening what a person said, or if it's intended as "ha ha!"

Goto next topic

You must register and log in to be able to participate in this discussion.