LOLsob
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About
LOLsob, sometimes referred to as LOLcry, is a portmanteau of the abbreviation for laugh out loud (LOL) and the word sob, meaning to cry. People use the term to express feelings of finding humor in extreme tragedy when horrific circumstances become so overwhelming they border on parody.
Origin
The earliest usage of the phrase occurred on February 11th, 2009. That day, Twitter [1] user @watercrown tweeted, "I WILL LISTEN TO TERU'S GREETING ON V-DAY LOLSOB I'm actually goin for a cosplay photoshoot on that day and I hope it will be fun" (shown below).
Spread
Usage of the term continued throughout the year, particularly on Twitter (example below, left).[2]
On July 23rd, 2009, the blog Shakesville[3] used the word to describe a poll in Time magazine about America's most trust journalist, which voters deemed to be Jon Stewart. They wrote, "Time Magazine has released the results of a poll, in the wake of the passing of Walter Cronkite, on who is now America's most trusted journalist. And the results…well, call it a LOLsob. In related news, seismic activity detectors reported a sustained tremor coming from the direction of the late Mr. Cronkite's grave."
On October 12th, Urban Dictionary user duenna9 defined the term as an "acronym for Laugh Out Loud + sob -- an expression for something that makes you lol and cry at the same time" (shown below, right).
The phrase continued in usage, with some creating emoji mashups for the term. On May 22nd, 2019, Twitter[4] user @i_pascu tweeted that his Slack channel had a LOLsob emote (shown below).
On June 30th, 2020, Danielle Butler uploaded two GIFs of emojis transforming from Crying Laughing emoji to just Loudly Crying Face emoji (shown below). They titled the entry "The LOLSOB."[5] They wrote, "In today's never-ending news cycle, there comes a need to laugh and cry at the same time. Here is a gif to meet that need. I did it all in sketch. I do all my animated gifs in sketch. Then I animate them using free online gif animators."
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