Gretchen McCulloch “Happy 25th Birthday to LOL” (Slate, May 23, 2014)
This month marks the 25th anniversary of the first known usage of LOL for “laughing out loud” (the “lots of love” interpretation, incidentally, is quite a bit older). The linguist Ben Zimmer notes that the earliest citation is from the May 1989 issue of a newsletter called Fidonet and is still available online, in all its ASCII’d glory.
Read the rest here.