When words and phrases mutate, they do so in order to fill some niche that needs filling. Often, that change involves taking a formerly powerful word or phrase (“awesome“, “oh my god”, “what the fuck”) and turning it into a wry comment (“If you could stop tapping your foot, that would be awesome”; “My boss was in a weird mood all morning and I was like WTF?” “OMG this cheesecake is amazing.”) This is why people actually speak “OMG” and “LOL” out loud, though they are no shorter than the phrases they replace. (“WTF” takes even longer to say than “what the fuck”.) As organisms adapt to ecological niches, so do new bits of language.

What are the long-term effects of all this?

We might see language littered with ever more phrases born of keyboard brevity. Another intriguing possibility involves the rise and spread of speech-to-text technology. One quirk of these systems is that they require speakers to enunciate punctuation and other typographical manoeuvres. (Eg: “Are you coming tonight question mark;New paragraph on another point, I’d like to mention that…”) As speech recognition software improves, we might go from language designed for a tiny keyboards entering our speech (people speaking “OMG” out loud), to language designed for speech recognition software entering our speech (people speaking “new paragraph” out loud to signal a change in topic). Such spoken punctuation would probably find the same special niche function as “WTF” and “LOL” have today. “Wow, I can’t wait to read your screenplay exclamation point” would mean something quite different from “Wow, I can’t wait to read your screenplay!”—namely, semi-ironic detachment.