Lol originally meant “laughing out loud”, but came to become a general response to something something humourous, akin to laughter. Lol still stands for laughing out loud, but it’s not the expanded abbreviation that comes to people’s minds nowadays. It’s simply a substitute for laughter on the Internet, like lmao and lmfao and… ugh, rofl. Though, lol is a lot more like a chuckle, and lmao and its friends feel more like slightly genuine laughter.
Wtf however has always meant “what the fuck”. It doesn’t stand in for anything. Humans don’t make a noise that communicates “what the fuck” like they do with laughter, which signals “I find that funny.” Wtf just means what it stands for, “what the fuck.”
All in all, we automatically translate both abbreviations. One is translated to a natural human response while the other is translated to an artificial one. Laughter is a universal language, but wtf merely stands in as a contraction for a phrase in a man-made language.
Lol originally meant “laughing out loud”, but came to become a general response to something something humourous, akin to laughter. Lol still stands for laughing out loud, but it’s not the expanded abbreviation that comes to people’s minds nowadays. It’s simply a substitute for laughter on the Internet, like lmao and lmfao and… ugh, rofl. Though, lol is a lot more like a chuckle, and lmao and its friends feel more like slightly genuine laughter.
Wtf however has always meant “what the fuck”. It doesn’t stand in for anything. Humans don’t make a noise that communicates “what the fuck” like they do with laughter, which signals “I find that funny.” Wtf just means what it stands for, “what the fuck.”
All in all, we automatically translate both abbreviations. One is translated to a natural human response while the other is translated to an artificial one. Laughter is a universal language, but wtf merely stands in as a contraction for a phrase in a man-made language.