Who would have thought that when Mark Zuckerberg sat in his college dorm, modestly making ‘The Facebook’ 11 years ago, that we would one day use his networking site to evaluate the evolution of language?
Answer: no one.
But hey-ho, the latest study by the social media giants has revealed the language we use most to express humour online, and it seems that the once beloved ‘lol’ - that’s ‘laugh out loud’ to extraterrestrials – has officially been dethroned.
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Maybe it’s because whenever we wrote it, we secretly meant: ‘we’re sat here expressionless and can’t think of anything witty to say.’
‘Haha’, however, is the new most popular way to show that someone’s funny post has tickled us. In fact, the survey showed that ‘haha’ accounted for 51per cent of the chuckles, with the laughter emoji coming in second with 33.7 per cent - forget abbreviations, you don’t even need to use letters to show your merriment anymore!
Next in the list was the ever-cheeky ‘hehe’ with 13.1 per cent, and last and least, ‘lol’ only featuring 1.9 per cent of the time in the sampled text, which is surprising as the expression is so commonly associated with online and text language.
Maybe it’s fallen out of fashion as older generations have caught-up-and-latched on to the phrase (sorry mum!), as it proved more popular among older generations.
Though the survey did show that not many Facebook users got their giggles on the regular, as the data showed 46 per cent of users only laughed once a week - sounds miserable.
These people clearly need to start following heatworld, like, now. ‘Hahas’ and ‘hehes’ guaranteed.