YOLO: You Only Live Once. As Far As We Know, Acronym Wise
YOLO, for those people who somehow missed learning popular acronyms and have only lived once so far, stands for: You Only Live Once.
We used to speak in acronyms when I was growing up, but the ones we used were CIA, KGB and the USSR, and AFL-CIO.
BRB and LOL weren’t even in existence, if anyone can believe that. Maybe OMG was, but I think I spelled that out, too. It was spelled, Oh, my God! We just took it for granted that we’d spell things out.
I’m not sure whether we’re saving that much time by using acronyms. They keep getting longer and each one has forty or more meanings. I know they do, because I look them up.
There was a question I saw concerning TEB, an acronym I didn’t recognize. Was it Too Effing Bad in text speak? Was someone being egregiously unsympathetic? No, it was something to do with Testing and Boards. Or Testing Equivalency Boards, or Those Eloquent Bastards, which is a great name for a rock group. Whatever the person meant by TEB, I never discovered, because TEB has forty possible meanings.
Should you gasp in disbelief at this information, you are the perfect candidate for me to tell you that LOL has 90! You heard me. Or, YHM.
Now that I know LOL has 90 possible meanings, it’ll take me forever to figure out what the texter is trying to say. There go the seconds saved by using an acronym. My friend or acquaintance might be saying I’m the Lowest of the Low, or suggesting Leg Of Lamb for dinner. Which is terrible. I’m not eating a lamb’s leg.
The time saving aspect of using an acronym is spurious at best. You have to hit the capitalization bar and then remember to hit it again so that everything you add after that isn’t an acronym, and then you have to decide whether to use an exclamation point or just a period at the end of it. Because generally, an acronym stands alone. It’s the big cheese of your conversation.
Right there, your time is being taken with punctuation and word style decisions and whether or not you need to add another word to your acronym. (I’m getting the impression another lifetime isn’t adequate for all of this. I’ll need a YOLTwice.)
If you say LOL, or LMAO, an exclamation point is moot really, but since YOLO, go ahead and put one in. If you want to emphasize that you find something hilarious, you type ROTFLMAO. This is where the absence of an exclamation point is weird. Why didn’t you include one? Are you so restrained when you roll on the floor laughing your ass off, that you do it quietly and with composure?
If you accidentally hit the question mark or the number 1 instead of an exclamation point, well, those are the things that keep life interesting.
ROTFLMAO? looks mildly intriguing. Do you not know whether you’re rolling on the floor, laughing your ass off, or do you expect someone to make that call for you? Have we become so indecisive we need other people (or OPs) to see us rolling on the floor, getting carpet fibers, lint, and dog hair on our clothes, and holding our stomachs to contain the pain of laughter, to come to that decision?
Of course not. You know what you’re doing. Hit that exclamation point!
To return to the subject at hand, which is YOLO and is the reason we don’t care about getting carpet fiber and lint in our hair, we’ve been led to believe that we only live once. Particularly if we live in a mainly Christian oriented country. There’s no way a Christian or a Jew believe in reincarnation.
We do believe in reanimation, however. Hollywood has brought this to our attention over and over and over again in remakes of old movies. I can’t remember all the supposedly deceased characters who’ve come back to life and blamed their death on a dream. “It was only a dream, Viewers. Just a dream.”
So YOLO is a non-starter for Hollywood. Hollywood gets to LMTO. (Live More Than Once. Or Leave My Television Off, which makes more sense than being told you’ve been living in a dream just for the sake of a story line and the end of a contract dispute with a popular character.)
YOLO sounds like it could be either a Japanese dish or an economy car. It would be an economy car with terrible safety ratings, though. The name is a challenge to every driver.
You only live once (their slogan goes), and our car guarantees that your life won’t last long! It goes from Zero to Eighty in Ten Seconds!
It could also be a new toy similar to a yo-yo. And if there’s one thing that makes you wish you had another life to live, it’s learning to use a yo-yo.
YOLO. A toy that laughs out loud.
The yo-yos I have had always laugh silently at me. Out loud would be too much.
Do they keep coming back and bopping you on the nose? Mine did. Walk the dog? That’s a joke. I have trouble getting my real dog to walk, never mind a yo-yo. A dash, huh? Will edit.
Bopped me on the nose and my glasses. And I was better at tangles than I was at anything else.
Yep, the silly thing has a dash. Pretty darn snooty if you ask me.
Haha! Yeah, for a lowly yo-yo.
Way back in 1996, when I first got a modem and an AOL account, I used to hang out in the AOL chatrooms. Many of them were populated by lonely single people hoping to meet a possible mate. Some prankster told me that LOL meant “Love On Line” — and I believed it for a while before someone told me its meaning.
Coincidentally, I met my current Significant Other in an AOL chatroom. She lived 2,000 miles away, but she moved. We’ve been together 20+ years.
That’s a wonderful story. You should write about that. One that worked out. There are so many that turned bad, aren’t there? Great story, Craig.
Gigi, love this post, so funny. Soon, instead of “pardon my French”, we’ll say “pardon my abrieviation”.
Did you know its quicker to say World Wide Web. than wwwdot
It is longer to say that, but then, no one says that anymore. They don’t even add ‘www’ anymore.
Pardone, moi texte, m’sieu. But I meant it, you blighter. (Or, YB.)
Nice to ‘see’ you, John!
My middle niece met her husband in a gaming forum. After messaging a lot and him convincing her that he did not live in his mom’s basement, was not a mouth breathing troglodyte, and did not own a stalker van, they met. Spent 4 hours talking. Married a year later and now have two sons. There are happy internet stories.
Yes, there are. I think Pat Ryan on Q, has one also. He said he was moving here from England to be with the woman he met on the site. That’s a big move!
What if he did own a ‘stalker van’? I mean, geez. Some guys need one. Just because there’s duct tape and shovels in the back isn’t proof I’m not a good guy. Haha!
Well, a girl has her standards!
Duct tape is just too sticky!
True, true. But man, does it work for any job.
Very cute my sweet, I got the implication of the Beatles lyric (The Cheese Stands Alone).
God help us, you are so clever. I will be grateful for this to my dying day as you are a great boon to me and many others in this wonderful Life.
Thank you, honey! I didn’t even think of The Beatles. Didn’t know they invented that, those blighters.