Did Shakespeare know how to ping? (Editor’s notes)

I will ping you later. Just don’t forget to poke me. If you speak BlackBerry and Facebook, respectively, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

If you don’t, well, you might be wondering about my sanity. But don’t fret. I’m mostly okay — it’s the language floating around us that’s getting a little bizarre.

In the early Internet days, cute little acronyms popped up. People typed LOL if they thought something was funny. This made sense. Actually “laughing out loud” in your rec room doesn’t translate over a keyboard, so a quick acronym to let folks know you thought something was funny, or you’re kidding, was practical if not a little cute. If it was really funny, you ended up “rolling on the floor laughing” — ROTFL.