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.
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If you use 'haha', you're probably old
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: If you use 'haha', you're probably old
#22All 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.
Re: If you use 'haha', you're probably old
#23In 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.
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!"
Re: If you use 'haha', you're probably old
#24[deleted]
Re: If you use 'haha', you're probably old
#25In Arabic, people use هههه (hhhh) without vowels because of the Arabic Harakat (حَرَكَات) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics
Re: If you use 'haha', you're probably old
#26Another '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...
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...
Re: If you use 'haha', you're probably old
#27I have enough Latin American Facebook friends that "jejeje" is starting to seem like the canonical e-laugh.
In Brazil it's "ha ha" too though.
Re: If you use 'haha', you're probably old
#28interestingly, 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.
"w" in Japanese is not an onomatopoeia but an abbreviation (for 笑い "warai" laugh) as same as in English "lol". There is an actual laughter onomatopoeia in Japanese too, it's "fu(fu)" or "a(ha)".
Re: If you use 'haha', you're probably old
#29In 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.
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!"
In my experience, Brazilians do something similar, typing "kkkkkkk" (or sometimes "rsrsrsrsr," I suppose because riso=laughter in Portuguese).
Re: If you use 'haha', you're probably old
#30Interestingly 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."
Likewise, I only use "Haha" for things that are truly funny. "lol" is reserved primarially to lend a degree of self-awareness to a particularly absurd or stupid statement that I say or recieve.
I only say 'lol' ironically.