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If you use 'haha', you're probably old
- Fastidious 12y agoInterestingly enough, I use "Haha" to denote sincere laughing. Mischievous laughing goes as "Hehe"; imitating an overweight person goes "Hoho" and normally imitating a timid person (or a woman, and I swear they are not related!) goes as "Hihi."
- sssilver 12y agoMy sentiments exactly. I'm 30.
- zwtaylor 12y agoLikewise, I only use "Haha" for things that are truly funny. "lol" is reserved primarially to lend a degree of self-awareness to a particularly absurd or stupid statement that I say or recieve.
- ianstallings 12y agoI always use eh, like I'm kind of laughing but kind of not impressed. Keeps them on their toes.
- morgante 12y agoMe too, but I'm only 23.
- moron4hire 12y agoI use "heh" to denote "I read your message, but I'm busy and I need you to stop talking to me". "I read your message, and I was mildly amused, but not enough to continue talking" is "hah". "I actually thought that was funny, but I'm still busy" is "haha". Real, actual laughter that wants to continue the conversation is "hahaha". I'm 32.
- colanderman 12y agoI thought this was a secret code only I knew. Now I have to conjure a different way of subliminally communicating my indisposure to chatty friends. Also, "hehe" means "only mildly amusing, but I'm not busy so I'll keep talking". (Unless you say "hehe" after something you wrote yourself, in which case it's creepy.) I'm 29.
- Gracana 12y ago> normally imitating a timid person (or a woman, and I swear they are not related!) goes as "Hihi." Or a ham radio operator, HI HI.
- selimthegrim 12y agoI almost always only use it with a unwritten accent like when it's said in triumph, writing "Haha" but meaning "Ha HAH!"
- abruzzi 12y ago'hihi' or 'hi hi' is another, fairly rare, written variant that is used as laughter in morse code, and has migrated to written text by people that commonly use morse code. I'm not sure the exact reason, but it does make all the letter dits. 'ha' is spelled .... .-, but 'hi' is spelled .... ..
- JasonFruit 12y agoI have enough Latin American Facebook friends that "jejeje" is starting to seem like the canonical e-laugh.
- hcarvalhoalves 12y agoIn Brazil it's "ha ha" too though.
- thiht 12y agoOn a free online game I play, Brazilians use "jaja" or "kkkkkk" or "huehuehue", how is that? Is it a "lol" equivalent?
- joverholt 12y agoAnother 'haha'er here. I can't stand LOL, though this TED [1] talk gives an interesting look at its use. [1]http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_lan...
- Varcht 12y agoI can't stand lol either, I recently was taught by my daughter that I was using heh a bit too liberally, and hurt her feelings. In rl its pretty hard to get more than a smirk from me, been using hehe more, correctly or not...
- brightsize 12y agoIMHO "lol" needs to die and take "meh" with it. I have no idea where the latter came from...some rancid corner of Memeville, TV no doubt.
- pimlottc 12y ago'meh' was largly popularized by The Simpsons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meh#Popularization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meh#Popularization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCcZqcPOlNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCcZqcPOlNM
- mappu 12y agoWe have `kek` and `w`.
- hyperliner 12y agoHas the New Yorker ran out of ideas for important issues to cover? It's funny, granted, but with everything going on in Baltimore and Nepal, it seems misplaced or at last badly timed.
- moron4hire 12y agoAnd it really seems like they've been on a trend of "OMG gen X, you so ooooooold" lately.
- hkmurakami 12y agointerestingly, in Korea the laugh is keke / kek / kkkk / etc., while in Japan the laugh is w / www / etc. Kind of like how animal sounds are very different across countries and cultures.
- pandaman 12y ago"w" in Japanese is not an onomatopoeia but an abbreviation (for 笑い "warai" laugh) as same as in English "lol". There is an actual laughter onomatopoeia in Japanese too, it's "fu(fu)" or "a(ha)".
- yongjik 12y agoKorean actually has a generous share of onomatopoeic words: for laugh, there's at least haha, hehe, hoho, heoheo, huhu, and kkalkkal, and that's just counting more or less standardized words that would probably appear in most dictionaries and have well-understood connotations. Interestingly, Korean internet somehow settled on ㅋㅋ (literally, "k k"): the closest word I can think of is 크크 (keukeu), which is... well, the kind of laugh a villain might make after explaining to a captured hero how he will be thrown into an elaborate death trap. (And don't believe some internet sources that say Koreans laugh "kekeke". It's simply because the sound I wrote as "eu" ("Close central unrounded vowel", or /ɨ/) has no English counterpart, so people wasn't sure how to write that in English. Besides, nobody's gonna pronounce "keukeukeu" correctly anyway, so why bother.)
- k__ 12y agoI always had the impression kek was a joke-version of lol lol -> lolz -> lulz -> lel -> kek
- markbnj 12y agoIn my personal experience "ha ha" is an almost default result of trying to avoid "lol." Why I try to avoid lol is a deeper question, but it has to do with AOL and how AOL looked from Compuserve in the early 90's. Anyway, yes I'm old.
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- nosuchthing 12y agolmbo
- qstyk 12y agoI'd add that "bwahaha" comes across as a laugh at a person's expense.
- nyolfen 12y agona man that just makes you sound poorly socialized
- geomark 12y agoIn Thailand 'haha' is used extensively but it is written 55 because in Thai the number 5 sounds like 'ha'. So it's a useful shorthand.
- reklawnos 12y agoI know many Korean speakers use "ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ" to express laughter. The "ㅋ" symbol has a sort of "kih" or "kuh" sound, so it's meant to represent a snickering "KihKihKihKihKih!"
- benbreen 12y agoIn my experience, Brazilians do something similar, typing "kkkkkkk" (or sometimes "rsrsrsrsr," I suppose because riso=laughter in Portuguese).
- ch3n 12y agothe oldest 'haha' in chinese word is from a book called Water Margin,written 600 years ago. that's really old. english version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin chinese version: http://baike.baidu.com/view/11282.htm http://baike.baidu.com/view/11282.htm
- ajkjk 12y agoAll of these have different meanings to me: ha haha hah aha ahaha 'ha ha' hahaha HA HAHAHA hahahahahahah haaahaaa lol LOL LMAO lawl elohel 'ha, ha' ha. heh hehe bwahaha 'ha,' though it's really hard to describe exactly the differences between them. context: I'm in my twenties and grew up using AIM and FB and playing MMOs. I think those are all relevant to the exact 'vernacular' I've ended up with.
- colanderman 12y agoDon't forget "lolololololol", which is different in meaning from all those you listed. (Specifically it is a form of sardonic laughter, as in "did you hear that Trump is running for president again?" "wtf no again?? / lololololol".)
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- AtlasLion 12y agoIn Arabic, people use هههه (hhhh) without vowels because of the Arabic Harakat (حَرَكَات) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics
- jzelinskie 12y agoIn Japanese, people usually end a statement with "w" as it is short for 笑う (romanized: warau) which means to laugh. It even parallels "lololol" by adding more "w"s (i.e. 偶然だｗｗｗ).
- ljak 12y agoSame in Hebrew: חחחח (hhhh)
- sampo 12y agoWhat about kekeke?
- maguay 12y agoIn Thailand, the default is "555" since the word five in Thai is pronounced "ha". Everyone in Thailand knows what it means, and the rest of the world must think we're crazy.
- christianbryant 12y agoHaha :-)
- wwweston 12y agoAnd if you use muahaha you're probably a villain of some kind.
- austenallred 12y agoI used "haha" mostly to avoid saying "lol." As crazy as it sounds, I got too lazy to keep doing that. Lol is all wIth one hand, and doesn't denote true laughter. It's more, "I received your message" than anything.
- guelo 12y agoI always took he he as a making fun of, like Nelson from the Simpsons.
- keyle 12y agoOn a side note, my personal favourite is the Bender laugh... "AHEHAEHAEHAHEAHE". It denotes forced amusement with a side of cynicism. And it's brilliant.
- languagehacker 12y agoWhat a meaningless parade of speculative bullshit. There's a science for discussions like this -- it's called corpus linguistics. There are people who have spent years of their lives trying to understand observed patterns in behavior using real data and statistical analysis. This a handful of anecdotes that even the most generative of armchair linguists would roll their eyes at.
- kareemm 12y agoA friend who spent some time in France always write MDR (mort de rire - "dying of laughter"). Before she went she was a hardcore LOLer.
- sqren 12y agoReminds me of this http://www.lolwithme.org/wp-content/uploads/hahahahah.jpg http://www.lolwithme.org/wp-content/uploads/hahahahah.jpg
- letstryagain 12y agoThe cool kids don't say 'lol' any more because uncool old people have started using it. Not it's all about 'lel' or 'kek' If it's really funny 'top kek'
- rey12rey 12y agoIt feels weird using "hehe". I type it exactly how I laugh, "haha hahahahahahaha". Although if I feel I might look stupid I try to tone it down with a simple ":D" or the emoji with the laughter to tears. Oh and I'm 22 ;)
- mami 12y agoI love the movie "marmaduke"
- auganov 12y agoThe first paragraph resonated with me a little bit. When I was younger (14-16) I'd always try to type as correctly and "seriously" as possible. I literally thought everyone who didn't do the same was just stupid. My IMing style is pretty much the opposite nowadays. And as much as one hates being biased I have to admit I still judge people on their typing style a bit. It's pretty hard to gauge one's tone/feeling/attitude without having all the hahas, emoticons, smileys, redundant words etc. Do they not like me? Are they trying to be rude? Are they being creepy? Are they just not much of an internet chatter? Is that just an aspie-like trait?
- moron4hire 12y agoFifteen years ago, I got temporarily banned from an English-speaking IRC channel (#gamedev on AfterNET) for my part in instigating the ironic usage of "kekeke", which was very well known at the time due to the popularity of Starcraft in South Korea.
- mqsoh 12y agoIn my experience and if I'm remembering correctly, hehe and haha were equally common on the dial up BBSs. I've used both all these years. I don't think the connotations have changed!