Making an ass of an acronym

Before I get on to today’s topic, which is the Joy of the Emoji – I know, I know, but you will have to wait – I have a small but related announcement to make: the English language has acquired a new word. The word – and I am not making this up – is lmao. By all accounts lmao has entered common usage and is therefore likely to find its way soon into the dictionary. To which the only possible response for anyone with even a smidgen of irony vested in his or her soul is, well, lmao. But perhaps I should do some explaining.

For those of you who have been living in a Tibetan monastery and painting buttercups these 30 years, lmao is an acronym spawned by the internet. It, and dozens like it, abound amid the lies and blurts and jerkings of the knee that pass for thoughts on Facebook, Twitter and other beauty spots.

The commonest of these acronyms is lol, which stands for laugh out loud. Lol is both redundant (laughter is out loud by definition) and pointless (announcing that something is funny doesn’t make it funny) but no one worries about that. Lol’s function, as with most of the internet, is self-promotion. Look at me, lol says, I’m not only a funky young thing who knows his internet jargon but also a joyous character who is forever chuckling at the ways of the world and brightening the lives of those around me with my splendid soh.

Lmao is one step up from lol. It is an abbreviation for – and readers of a squeamish disposition may wish to look away now and rejoin us at the start of the next paragraph but two – laughing my ass off.

The word ass, here, is how prudish Americans avoid saying the word arse, even though ass meaning donkey and arse meaning arse are both words of long and lustrous pedigree. Arse, indeed, can be traced back not only to the Germanic languages that are the root of English but even to proto-Indo European, the hypothetical language spoken by a stone age tribe in Eastern Europe that is the root of everything from Hindi to Latin as well as, naturally, the Germanic languages that are the root of English.

So we have had more than 7000 years to get over being offended by the forthright simplicity of the word arse, but not only have Americans failed to do so, they’ve even become offended by the word they’ve replaced it with, the word ass being now regularly printed as a**.

All of which should serve to remind us, if we needed reminding, that the founding white colonists of America were a boatload of killjoy religious fanatics whose descendants 400 years later are still upset by mention of their own unlovely body parts. Sometimes, if you do not lol at this world you have to cry.

To summarise, then: lmao is an awkward acronym of an American euphemism of an inelegant metaphor. But now it seems not everyone understands that it’s an acronym and some have taken to using it in conversation as a word in its own right.

Such a process is not new. Taser, radar and scuba all began life as acronyms. Taser, radar and scuba, however, were coined with a view to their being used as words. The same cannot be said of lmao.

So if in the coming weeks you find yourself addressed by a young person striving to speak English but mewing like a cat, be gentle with them. They are the future. (And so is next week’s column on the Joy of the Emoji.)