The Texting Laughter Scale

First of all, I probably knew what 1337 meant before you were born, so some of the items on this scale will be a little too geeky for your taste. If that’s the case, you are hereby excused to your social life of gyms and nightclubs and water coolers and philanthropy. For people who spend the majority of their daily communication on such platforms as texting, IM, E-Mail, forums, and MMO’s, here is the official “texting laughter scale” which I found on a prominent web site out there on the Internet. This is very very official. It has been created by science itself. Just kidding, it was actually created by J. William Patterson in 1934. Can you believe how long this has existed? This scale is listed in order of how much you’re laughing at your keyboard from least to greatest and is case-sensitive:

1. ha
2. hehe
3. lol
4. rofl
5. haha
6. lolz
7. lmao
8. LOL
9. hahaha
10. lmfao
11. roflmao
12. omgrofl
13. ROFL
14. LMAO
15. LMFAO
16. ROFLMAO
17. OMGROFL
18. OMFGROFL
19. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
20. ROFLEARL
21. EARL

Those last two are undoubtedly new to you. That’s because something happened that was so funny one time that the Internet had no word for it. Thus “EARL” was born. It does not stand for anything, and it should only be used if your computer monitor is already covered with beverage spit. Please don’t abuse this scale. If something’s only a “hahaha”, don’t use a “LMFAO” because the person you are chatting with will think they are funnier than they really are and get a big head, and then they might get inspired to go write a “funny” blog post that people will have to read and comment on just to be nice, similarly to the post you are now reading. How’s that for self-referential recursion within a recursion? You just got Inceptioned.