LOL is out, IJBOL is in

NEW YORK – First, there was LOL (“laugh out loud”), an acronym that first appeared in the 1980s and became the reigning shorthand online for what people found funny.

Then came ROFL (“rolling on the floor laughing”), LMAO (“laughing my a** off”) and non-verbal cues such as smiling emojis.

Still, most type these terms straight-faced, relegating them to dull punctuation added carelessly to the end of a message.

Now, the Internet wants to revitalise laughing online with a new term: IJBOL.

Though it may sound like a Korean word or the name of a new boy band, IJBOL (pronounced “eej-bowl”) stands for “I just burst out laughing”.

The term is not necessarily novel or different from how other iterations of Internet laughter are used, but it describes something people do – explode into an audible, full-belly guffaw.

It homes in on a type of laugh that may come in inappropriate or untimely settings – perhaps at a funeral, in reaction to a punchline just a beat too late or when you suddenly remember something funny.

Ms Ellie Jocson, a 25-year-old bank analyst in Manila, uses IJBOL instead of LOL, as it more accurately reflects what happened “behind the screen” while scrolling through social media.

“I’m usually just quiet,” she said. “And then I let out a snort.”

For Gen Zers, it comes as a timely replacement for a slew of terms that no longer feel fitting.

“I don’t LMAO. It’s just not what I do,” said 27-year-old content creator Michael Messineo, who lives in Melbourne. “I associate LMAO with millennial humour and IJBOL with Gen Z humour, which is funnier.”

College student Sebastian Champagne, a 20-year-old who lives in Massachusetts, said: “My friends are all around the same age, like 18 to early 20s. So many of us were like, ‘This is going to be our word now.’”

On the Internet, IJBOL has been closely associated with celebrities, such as rapper Nicki Minaj, who fell back in her chair with laughter on a live stream, and singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, who laughed loudly into a microphone onstage while surrounded by cheering fans.

But the unofficial face of IJBOL, according to Twitter, is United States Vice-President Kamala Harris. She has a reputation for chuckling unprompted, injecting levity or nervousness into any situation.

In viral videos posted online, she can often be seen doubling over during an interview, almost dropping the microphone in her hand, or singing to the camera and laughing while strolling to her campaign bus.

“It’s sort of like her ‘meme-able’ factor,” said Mr Champagne. “When IJBOL came out, people started to use her as a way to coincide the two together, because she’s like the perfect definition of IJBOL. She’s always laughing at everything.”

Though the acronym was entered into Urban Dictionary in 2009, it picked up in 2021 among K-pop fans, who would endearingly categorise their idols according to Internet acronyms.

Some can be labelled IJBOL (for celebrities who laugh all the time); others, DPMO (meaning “don’t p*** me off”, for those who get angry about everything).

When Ms Jocson came across IJBOL in 2022 on Twitter, she thought it was a Korean word – one of many that she did not recognise as a non-Korean-speaking fan of K-pop girl group Blackpink.

IJBOL has a similar look to the Korean word for a large family-owned business conglomerate, “chaebol”.

“I also thought, like other K-pop enthusiasts, that it’s a Korean word,” she said. “I initially didn’t know what it meant. I had to Google it.”

Niche corners of the Internet, such as K-pop fandoms, can produce “spaces of creativity” where new lexicons are invented, said Professor Michelle McSweeney, a City University of New York Graduate Center faculty who studies digital laughter.

These words could not exist without the lingo-swopping of these subgroups.

“It doesn’t surprise me that it started on K-pop Twitter, because that’s a pretty tight-knit community that communicates a lot with one another and creates these new norms,” said Prof McSweeney, who is also the author of OK (2023), a book about how technology shapes language.

When outsiders start adopting a colloquial term, the word loses its specificity, and that is when it becomes less fun.

“You would use LOL with your boss. I will say that I have used LMAO with my boss, but that’s as far as I escalate,” Prof McSweeney said.

“That’s why we need to bring new terms into circulation, because you’re not going to write to your best friend the same thing you to write to your boss.”

The word would lose its edge and intimacy if, say, Ms Harris started using IJBOL in her campaign – or if the term was written about in a daily newspaper.

“Everyone would lose his or her mind, then never say it again,” Mr Champagne said. NYTIMES