
If you use 'haha', you're probably old - sr_chase
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/hahaha-vs-hehehe
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markbnj
In 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.

~~~
nosuchthing
lmbo

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Fastidious
Interestingly 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."

~~~
moron4hire
I 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
I 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.

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ajkjk
All 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
Don'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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JasonFruit
I have enough Latin American Facebook friends that "jejeje" is starting to
seem like the canonical e-laugh.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
In Brazil it's "ha ha" too though.

~~~
thiht
On a free online game I play, Brazilians use "jaja" or "kkkkkk" or
"huehuehue", how is that? Is it a "lol" equivalent?

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AtlasLion
In 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
In 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).

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hkmurakami
interestingly, 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.

~~~
yongjik
Korean 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.)

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letstryagain
The 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'

~~~
lsaferite
So... WTF is 'kek'?

~~~
azatris
World of Warcraft: When Alliance member said "lol", the Horde member saw it as
"kek". Imitation of different languages.

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geomark
In 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
I 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
In my experience, Brazilians do something similar, typing "kkkkkkk" (or
sometimes "rsrsrsrsr," I suppose because riso=laughter in Portuguese).

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qstyk
I'd add that "bwahaha" comes across as a laugh at a person's expense.

~~~
nyolfen
na man that just makes you sound poorly socialized

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joverholt
Another '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_lan...](http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk?language=en)

~~~
Varcht
I 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
IMHO "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
'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)

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auganov
The 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?

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austenallred
I 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.

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maguay
In 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.

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wwweston
And if you use muahaha you're probably a villain of some kind.

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keyle
On a side note, my personal favourite is the Bender laugh...
"AHEHAEHAEHAHEAHE". It denotes forced amusement with a side of cynicism. And
it's brilliant.

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abruzzi
'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 .... ..

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moron4hire
Fifteen 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.

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rey12rey
It 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 ;)

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sqren
Reminds me of this [http://www.lolwithme.org/wp-
content/uploads/hahahahah.jpg](http://www.lolwithme.org/wp-
content/uploads/hahahahah.jpg)

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mqsoh
In 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!

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ch3n
the 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)

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kareemm
A friend who spent some time in France always write MDR (mort de rire - "dying
of laughter"). Before she went she was a hardcore LOLer.

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languagehacker
What 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.

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guelo
I always took he he as a making fun of, like Nelson from the Simpsons.

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hyperliner
Has 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
And it really seems like they've been on a trend of "OMG gen X, you so
ooooooold" lately.

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christianbryant
Haha :-)

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mappu
We have `kek` and `w`.

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sampo
What about kekeke?

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mami
I love the movie "marmaduke"

