LOL Is Not Unc, and Retiring It Solves Nothing

LOL is not unc, and Jenna Bush Hager proved the point by refusing to give up a three-letter habit on live television. The refusal landed because the habit in question was so small. During an October broadcast of TODAY With Jenna and Sheinelle, the show took up a Reddit question about whether millennials should retire LOL, after a poster noticed younger cousins typing haha or an emoji instead, according to OK Magazine. Hager answered with a flat defence, and co-host Sheinelle Jones backed her at once, according to OK Magazine. The segment was filed under a title about a divided internet, but the real divide was simpler: one generation treats LOL as a reflex, and another treats it as a giveaway.

The case for keeping LOL starts with what those three letters actually do in a message. LOL is not unc, and the reason has little to do with nostalgia. In everyday texting, LOL rarely means that anyone laughed out loud. The letters soften a sentence, signal warmth, and close a thought without turning it into a formal statement. A bare haha can do some of that work, and an emoji can do more of it, but neither carries quite the same lightness. LOL sits between a laugh and a shrug, and that middle ground is exactly where most casual messages live.

OK Magazine reported that the Reddit question at the centre of the segment asked whether LOL belonged only to millennials now, because younger cousins never used it. That question gets the direction of travel right and the judgement wrong. Younger texters do favour haha, emoji, and newer slang, and older texters do stick with the abbreviations learned when texting first became a daily habit. None of that makes LOL broken. It makes LOL a marker of when a person learned to type with thumbs, which is a biography detail, not a flaw.

Why LOL still earns its place

LOL is not unc in practice, because the shorthand keeps solving a problem that newer options leave unsolved. A message that ends with LOL tells the reader not to take the previous line too seriously, and it does so without demanding a reaction. An emoji can land harder, and a skull emoji can read as irony to one reader and confusion to another. LOL, by contrast, has been read the same way for so long that its meaning survives across age groups, workplaces, and family group chats. Familiarity is not a weakness in a tool built for quick communication. Familiarity is the whole point.

LOL is not unc for staying put while slang churns. The argument against LOL also leans too hard on the idea that slang must keep moving to stay valid. Slang does move, and every generation watches its own favourites slide into the dated pile. The laughing-crying emoji went from standard to supposedly uncool, the thumbs-up reply went from polite to supposedly cold, and capital letters went from normal to supposedly aggressive in some chats. Each shift was treated as a verdict at the time, and each shift looks smaller with distance. LOL is not unc for surviving those cycles. LOL is not unc because the cycles themselves keep proving that yesterday's embarrassment becomes today's shorthand again, once the people who mocked it start texting their own nieces and nephews.

LOL is not unc for being familiar. There is also a practical point that the mockery skips. Texting across generations is already hard enough without a rulebook that changes every season. A parent texting a teenager, a manager texting a new hire, and a friend texting across a decade-wide age gap all need words that land softly in every direction. LOL does that work precisely because it is unremarkable. Retiring it would not make messages clearer. Retiring it would make messages fussier, as people paused to pick the currently approved laugh marker instead of simply sending the thought.

Calling slang old says more about age than language

Unc, the label at the centre of the TODAY segment, deserves a closer look than the segment gave it. Dictionary.com explained that unc is short for uncle, and that younger users apply it to an older person seen as uncool or out of touch, according to Dictionary.com. The same guide noted that the word began in Black communities as a sign of respect or lighthearted affection for older male family members or mentors, according to Dictionary.com. That history matters, because it shows how a word of respect can be borrowed, flattened into a joke about age, and then aimed at anyone whose habits look dated. The joke lands, but the flattening is real.

LOL is not unc, and treating it as a punchline misses how language actually ages. Words do not become old because younger people stop using them. Words become old when they stop working, and LOL still works in the exact places where it always worked: the quick reply, the gentle landing, the message that needs a little warmth without a big performance. Younger slang will have its own turn in the same spotlight, and the same jokes will follow it. The skull emoji and the crying face already carry their own generational stamp, and a future cohort will find a reason to call those dated too. That cycle is not a reason to retire every marker on schedule. That cycle is a reason to stop pretending that the newest marker is the only honest one.

According to our earlier reporting, generations already disagree sharply about what counts as real work online, with younger adults far more likely to treat social media as a legitimate career, and that disagreement shows how quickly a generational label can harden into a judgement. Half of Gen Z says social media is a real job, according to earlier reporting on this site, while older adults remain far more sceptical. According to our earlier reporting, younger adults have also led support for keeping children off social media, which undercuts the easy story that younger users simply embrace every online habit. Gen Z backs a social media ban for kids, according to earlier reporting on this site. Generations are not monoliths, and slang is not a loyalty test.

The TODAY exchange worked as television because Hager did not apologise for the habit, and Jones did not hedge. OK Magazine reported that Hager described herself as LOL for life, and that Jones answered in kind, according to OK Magazine. LOL is not unc, and that exchange is the strongest evidence in its favour: two hosts from different generations found the same shorthand useful on the same morning, in front of the same audience, without needing a translator. Keep the letters. Let the next slang wave arrive on its own schedule, and let LOL keep doing the quiet job it has done since texting began.