Editors’ note: This is part of the Op-Eds From the Future series, in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 50 or even 200 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.

When you think of communication back in the early 21st century, you probably think of it as the beginnings of the modern phone. But you may not realize that it’s also the origin point for many words and linguistic constructions that we’re still using now, 200 years later. I’ve been using the records at the Internet Archive to research the English of this fascinating historical era, and my research has led me to believe that we should take a more relaxed and curious attitude toward our own language changes in the 23rd century.

For example, did you know that there was a period between the 17th and the 20th centuries when English didn’t make a distinction between formal and informal ways of addressing someone? Shakespeare distinguished between formal “you” and informal “thou,” but our presentday distinction between formal “you” and informal “u” dates back only to the beginning of the internet age. How could people of this unfortunate era have had a true understanding of the Bard when they had no way to fully grasp the intimacy of the sonnets (“shall i compare u to a summer’s day / u are more lovely and more temperate”)?

I was also surprised to learn in my archival research that “lol” was once an acronym! Today, we’re all used to it being a simple indicator of double meaning, but it actually once stood for the phrase “laughing out loud.” I’ve even seen historic phrases like “it’s lol funny,” which only make sense if we interpret them as “it’s laugh-out-loud funny.” The shift from genuine to aspirational laughter seems to have been well underway by 2001, and the further shift to irony that we’re all familiar with today happened more gradually in the decades after. Strange enough, there are even some records of people spelling it “LOL” or pronouncing it “ell oh ell” before it settled on the obvious “loll” pronunciation.