On the internet, IJBOL has been closely associated with celebrities, including Nicki Minaj, who fell back in her chair with laughter on a livestream, and Taylor Swift, who loudly ha-haed into a microphone onstage while surrounded by cheering fans.
But the unofficial face of IJBOL, according to Twitter, is Vice President Kamala Harris (who is among the youngest Boomers). Harris has a reputation for chuckling unprompted, injecting levity or nervousness into any situation. In viral videos posted online, Harris can often be seen doubling over during an interview, almost dropping the microphone in her hand, or singing to the camera and laughing while strolling to her campaign bus (Harris did not respond to a request for comment).
“She’s kind of like the perfect definition of IJBOL,” Champagne says. “She’s always laughing at everything.”
Though the acronym was entered into Urban Dictionary in 2009, it picked up in 2021 among K-pop fans, who would endearingly categorise their idols according to internet acronyms. Some can be labelled IJBOL (for celebrities who laugh all the time); others, DPMO (meaning “don’t piss me off”, for celebrities who get angry about everything).
When Jocson came across IJBOL last year on Twitter, she thought it was a Korean word – one of many that she didn’t recognise as a non-Korean-speaking fan of the K-pop girl group Blackpink. IJBOL has a similar look to the Korean word for a large family-owned business conglomerate, “chaebol”, or the curse word “shibal”.
Fans of K-pop acts such as Blackpink can produce “spaces of creativity” where new words are invented. BLACKPINK, presented by YG ENTERTAINMENT
“I also thought, like other K-pop enthusiasts, that it’s a Korean word,” Jocson says. “I initially didn’t know what it meant. I had to Google it.”
Niche corners of the internet such as K-pop fandoms can produce “spaces of creativity” where new lexicons are invented, says Michelle McSweeney, a City University of New York Graduate Centre professor who studies digital laughter. These words couldn’t exist without the lingo-swapping of these subgroups.
“It so doesn’t surprise me that it first started on K-pop Twitter, because that’s also a pretty tight-knit community that communicates a lot with each other and creates these new norms,” says McSweeney, who is also the author of OK, a book about how technology shapes language.
When outsiders start adopting a colloquial term, the word loses its specificity, and that’s when it becomes less fun.
“You would totally use LOL with your boss,” McSweeney says. “I will say that I have used LMAO with my boss, but, like, that’s as far as I escalate. That’s why we need to bring new terms into circulation, because you’re not going to write to your best friend the same thing they’re going to write to your boss.”
The word would lose its edge and intimacy if, say, Harris started using IJBOL in her campaign, or if the term was written about in a daily newspaper.
“Everyone would, like, lose their minds, then never say it again,” Champagne says.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.