LOL

Laughing out loud, no longer implying either. The most successful acronym in the language; now a full stop with a smile in it.

Away from keyboard. Once a real status; now an artefact of a time when leaving the machine was a distinct, announceable event.

Be right back. Fading because nobody is ever away, only slower to reply.

'I'm deceased' — laughing so hard you have died, in the formal register — as the successor to 'I'm dead' and the ancestor of the skull emoji. The record's entry for the death by laughter as a genre, and for the formality that made it funnier.

'HELP' — in capitals, as a reaction to something funny rather than a request — the 2020s' way of saying 'this is too much', and the record's entry for the cry that has never once been answered because it was never a cry.

The hierarchy of typed laughter — 'haha' is warm, 'ha' is cold, 'hahaha' is sincere, 'lol' is punctuation, 'LOL' is sarcasm — as codified by a 2015 Facebook study and by everyone who has ever read a text too closely. The record's entry for the science of the fake laugh.

The site that turned lolcats into a business with a headcount. Still online; nobody has needed to visit since the cats got captioned everywhere else.

In my humble opinion, preceding an opinion that was not. The H was contested from the start and the argument has outlived the acronym.