A @name

Twitter has a search bar thing and in it, it says "enter a @name or username". Now, I've been pronouncing @name as "at name", because that to me is an "at sign". I don't know if twitter is calling it something else. That's what the article "a" rather than "an" suggests. But what could it be calling it?

In other languages, it's called things like "monkey tail", "elephant's trunk", "little dog", "snail" and other animal-based names reflecting its shape. But in English it's really only called the "at sign".

So twitter, why you no obey phonological rules?

LOL is a verb

Well, you knew that. It's short for 'laugh out loud'. Is that a verb? Well, depends how you use it. If you mean '[I am] laughing out loud [right now]' then not really; it's a gerund or maybe a participle. But if you say 'I totally LOLed at that' then yeah, you just verbed LOL.

But I'm not talking about boring old English. In French (which, remember, people love to hold up as an example of a sensible language with a prescriptive Academie Francaise to uphold the standards of purity in the language) they've only gone and verbed it there too!

As you might expect, it's an -er verb, the 'default' conjugation (see Steven Pinker's 'Words and Rules' for a lay-person-friendly explanation of default inflections). This means you get this paradigm:

je lole
tu loles
il/elle/on lole
nous lolons
vous lolez
ils/elles lolent

(I totally just conjugated that from memory so it may not be absolutely accurate.)

Notice that this is an English acronym with French morphology applied to it. A knowledgeable colleague told me today that French has its own acronymic (yes, it's an initialism, not an acronym, whatever) equivalent of FML. It's VDM, or 'vie de merde', apparently. Go French.

Fuckin A and the importance of commas

I saw this image on the internets illustrating this poor chap's inability to use commas (and knowledge of the difference between the spelling of comma and coma, an important distinction). 

After sniggering at the inappropriate mental image, I actually had trouble working out what the original meaning was. The comma is supposed to go after I have to watch him, I think (although a full stop would be better, probably), so 'Robby' has to watch his grandpa tonight. Then he says fuckin a man, tonite is gunna suck.

Well that's odd, I thought. Surely, if I know anything about anything, fuckin a is short for fuckin awesome (sorry about the inordinate amount of swearing in this post, by the way). And you would not be saying that it was awesome if you then said it was going to suck. Which he does. It's sarcasm, I suppose, but I missed it because people like this are not normally known for their use of sarcasm (by 'people like this' I'm generalising horribly over all people who write like this, but it's true).

So I looked it up on Urban Dictionary, because that's where you get incomplete and inaccurate information about colloquial expressions, and it said that it does stand for awesome, but that you can use it whether the situation is good or bad. The entry never mentions the word 'sarcasm', though, so I wonder if it's not sarcasm but in fact just generalisation or broadening of an expression from an exclamation of pleasure to an exclamation of any strong feeling. Knowing the intonation would help, but as I don't associate with teenagers I can't say it's a usage I'm familiar with in real life. Or irl, as the internet would say.

TL;DR

I learnt what that means just recently. I've seen it loads and couldn't be bothered to find out. Fittingly, it turns out to mean 'too long; didn't read', for use on the internet when someone posts something that just looks too long and boring to bother reading. Is it the only initialism (or even abbreviation) with a semi-colon in it?