LAUGH IT UP—ONLINE OR OFF

WHAT WITH ONE THING AND ANOTHER, there seems to be little to laugh about these days. But what is laughter? Why do we laugh? And how do we laugh in different languages—including online? Here are tidbits about laughter gleaned from a variety of sources.

Merriam-Webster defines “laughter” as “a sound of or as if of laughing.”

Gee, as a definition I find this laughable in its circularity. M-W is a little better in its definition of “laugh” as showing “emotion (such as mirth, joy, or scorn) with a chuckle or explosive vocal sound.”

 Wikipedia gets into more details: “Laughter is a pleasant physical reaction and emotion consisting usually of rhythmical, often audible contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system. It is a response to certain external or internal stimuli. Laughter can rise from such activities as being tickled, or from humorous stories or thoughts.”

The “rhythmical” aspect explains various languages’ choice of sounds for laughter. The lexody.com website offers a listing, among them: “ha ha (English), jaja (Spanish), xaxa (in Russian or Greek characters),and ’哈哈’ (Mandarin). The idea is to repeat the sound of that audible contraction.

Lexody also offers “ ‘www’ in Japanese. No, this does not stand for ‘world wide web’—it doesn’t actually stand for anything. In theory the ‘w’ shortens from the Japanese word for ‘laugh’ which is ‘warai’. As the joke gets funnier, so do the number of w’s.” 

I like the repeated image of hahahahaha for something that has me rofl.

Image by Brendan Conroy for Rest of World.  

Online. Amy Thorpe and Ravi Hiranand offer an extensive list of online laughs at restofworld.org., December 18, 2023. They observe, “In person, laughter is universal. No matter what language you speak, almost anyone can understand the meaning of a mischievous giggle, sarcastic snort, or an infectious belly laugh. But it isn’t quite as simple when it comes to writing it down, especially in the era of social media and messaging apps.” What’s more, they offer some etymology of foreign laughs:

A Japanese Grass Field. Thorpe and Hiranand write, “ ‘Warau’ is one way to express laughter. Some shortened that to just the first sound of the word, ‘w.’ Others then noticed that ‘www’ looked like blades of grass, leading people to start using the Japanese word for grass (草) to represent laughter. That continual evolution is why, if you want to write about laughing hard in Japanese, you could type 大草原: ‘giant grass field.’ ”

Numerical Laughs. Online shorthand in different languages uses keyboard numbers to represent sounds. For instance, Thorpe and Hiranand observe that Arabic ح sounds like “ha” and looks kinda like a 7. Thus, for a while there, 7777 was an Arabic online laugh.

In Estonian online, an ironic laugh is written h6h6h6h6 because 6 is pronounced “oh.” In Laotian and in Thai, 5 is pronounced “ha” and thus 555 appears online to express amusement. Mandarin online 2333 reflects a popular forum’s laughing emoticon which happens to be numbered 233. 

This recalls the prisoners who remind each other of jokes solely by number: One yells “17,” and the others all remember that joke and laugh. Later a newcomer wants to take part and asks his cellmate for a good number. He’s told 17 gets a laugh, he yells it out—and there’s an embarrassing silence. “Well,” his cellmate says, “some people can tell a joke and some can’t….”

Acronyms. In Brazilian Portuguese, rsrsrs is short for repetition of riso, the word for “laughter.” In French, mdr stands for mort de rire, loosely “die laughing.” I wonder if mrd might be used for merde?

I like the Bulgarian рофл, the Cyrillic version of “rofl.” And the Cyrillic лол, “lol.” Also, the Hebrew למאו, “lmao.”

Thorpe and Hiranand certainly did a lot of research, mkn. By the way, mano kuklia nuomone is Lithuanian for imho. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024