Documentation (with quotation in the style used by the OED) about 
the first usage of the expression:
         "Laughing out loud and rolling on the floor."

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Request for Question Clarification by grimace-ga on 21 Jun 2002 11:49 PDT

Don't you mean "rolling on the floor and laughing out loud"? I've only
seen it, in any case, in its online form (ROFLOL), and the OED don't
take citations from online sources at the moment.

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Clarification of Question by juancarlos-ga on 22 Jun 2002 20:55 PDT

Yes. If the quotation contains both parts, I'll consider it equivalent to
my version. I wrote it based on the physiologic chain of causation: the
laughter precedes the fall, in some cases the individual then rolls on the
floor. Seeing it used so frequently online, I expected it to be old enough
as to be used in work quoted by the OED. I couldn't find it in the OED, 
several years ago "by hand and magnifying glass" in my own copy of the OED
and I expected to find it now in the digital OED online that includes the 
draft of a very new edition. No success.

Listing in an acronyms list is not the type of "answer" I'm looking for
--unless it mentions some kind of date, mentions its origin, and/or 
gives reference to the contexts in which it was or it's being used. 
The acronym appears to have been created for communication in USENET 
and then in the Internet. Description from a physiology/medicine work
doesn't count either. I'm trying to "connect the dots" between the
physiological phenomena and the popular use of the phrase for a study
of the natural history of some neurological disorders.

"Payment": As stipulated in the Google contract.
"Bonus":   Due acknowledgment (by real name, preferably) if I use
           the info in a publication.
"More":    If the info found appears to me to be an extensive and 
           important enough contribution as to suggest a "stand 
           alone" publication, the researcher(s) and/or commenter(s) 
           get upgraded to collaborator(s). In this case, according 
           to scholarly etiquette, no fee can be paid and we work
           by private email, phone, etc.
           collaborators and co-sign the publication.

I don't think I can really justify charging you for the little
information I found, but here it is:

Hello,

Google Groups shows about 30,200 examples of "ROFLOL" from Usenet. It
appears first in 1992 in a post to alt.rock-n-roll:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ROFLOL&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&as_drrb=b&as_mind=12&as_minm=5&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=21&as_maxm=6&as_maxy=1993&selm=1992Aug28.131528.1801%40lmt.mn.org&rnum=3>

The poster was someone named Dave Alexander at LaserMaster of
Minneapolis.

By May 1993, it had appeared in a list of Internet acronyms on
misc.kids:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ROFLOL&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&as_drrb=b&as_mind=12&as_minm=5&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=21&as_maxm=6&as_maxy=1993&selm=1tbdv2%24bb8%40techbook.techbook.com&rnum=1>

ROFLOL appears to be a combination of the older phrases "Laughing Out
Loud" (LOL) and "Rolling on the Floor" (ROF). The first Google Groups
entry for those phrases comes from the May 8, 1989 edition of
FidoNews, a newsletter for FidoNet (an ancestor of the commercial
Internet we know today). The writer says he has seen similar acronyms
and emoticons for "several years" before 1989. The Web site is:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rolling+floor+laughing+out+loud&start=60&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&scoring=d&as_drrb=b&as_mind=12&as_minm=5&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=21&as_maxm=6&as_maxy=1992&selm=7238%40hoptoad.uucp&rnum=62>

I hope that gets you started.

It may have originated in French, where 'roulant' can mean 'rolling'
or 'hilarious', and where the idiom 'se rouler par terre de rire'
means 'to roll on the ground laughing'.

From about.com:
http://french.about.com/library/express/blex-rouler.htm

If it's the physiological phenomena you're interested in, would
"rolling in the aisles" work as well?  It has the advantage that the
OED does define and date:

to have, lay, send (people) (rolling) in the aisles: to make (an
audience) laugh uncontrollably; to be a great theatrical success. Also
transf.

    * 1940 Wodehouse Quick Service xii. 136, I made the speech of a
lifetime. I had them tearing up the seats and rolling in the aisles.

    * 1943 D. W. Brogan Eng. People vii. 202 This trick had the
population, white and coloured, rolling in the aisles.

    * 1954 N. Coward Future Indef. i. 17 This, to use a theatrical
phrase, had them in the aisles! In fact, two of my inquisitors laughed
until they cried.

    * 1959 Sunday Express 11 Oct. 6/5 A book that sends my English
friends rolling in the aisles.

    * 1959 Times 14 Dec. 13/4 We looked forward to a school play which
would really lay them in the aisles.

Can't find the origins for you, but maybe I can help you get on the
right path.

Solely based on personal experience on Usenet, I think the phrases
originated separately, and were joined later.

Also, an alternate variation for Rolling on the Floor Laughing is
'ROTFL,' so you may want to look for that as well.

Here is a crazy long URL for a collection of smilies posted in 1990
that lists 'ROTFL':

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rofl&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&scoring=d&as_drrb=b&as_mind=12&as_minm=5&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=13&as_maxm=7&as_maxy=1990&selm=37118%40apple.Apple.COM&rnum=2

and here's a 1989 'ROFL,' which shows that the initialism was already
well-known by that time:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rofl&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&scoring=d&as_drrb=b&as_mind=12&as_minm=5&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=13&as_maxm=7&as_maxy=1990&selm=37118%40apple.Apple.COM&rnum=2

These are the two earliest references I could find searching on Google
Groups for 'ROTFL' and 'ROFL' between 1981 and 1990, but they were
clearly in use well before then.

I'm going to guess that they originated on BBSes. I know they were
used on BBSes a very long time ago, and I'm going to guess that I saw
them in use in the mid-80s, but I can't provide a reference.

Mere moments ago, I posted a comment to another thread telling someone
that I thought the origins of a phrase were so mired in obscurity that
he'd probably never find an exact reference. And here I am, doing it
again.

Many (most?) BBSes were privately run hobby projects, and as such,
most of the logs are long gone. Your best bet might be to try to
locate as many old-timey BBS people as you can, possibly through the
Internet Pioneers site at http://internet-history.org/ or somesuch,
but to be brutally honest, there probably isn't a definitive cite out
there, and it's unlikely that you'll be able to find anyone who can
definitively tell you that they were witness to the first usage.

Sorry I couldn't come up with something definitive for you.

Probably as definitive an answer to be found is Eric Raymond's Jargon
File (aka Hacker's Dictionary). The entry for "talk mode" discusses a
number of shorthand abbreviations and other indicators that were
invented for chatting on Unix or BBS systems (even before there was
IRC, or AOL). The entry lists ROTF, ROTFL, and LOL in a group of
expressions attributed to early online services like GEnie and
Compuserve -- which is where I first recall seeing it, in the late
1980s.

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/talk-mode.html

There were quite a few variations, e.g. LMAO (laughing my ass off),
ROFLOLPMP (rolling on floor, laughing out loud, peeing my pants), and
sometimes people would make up new, or especially rude, variations on
the spot so that another chatter would ask what it stood for. In those
days (80s), you would often still see the comma, e.g. "ROF,L". One way
of looking at it was an acronymic escalation, where LOL probably meant
really laughing out loud at one point, but later if someone said
nothing more than LOL it was taken as a chuckle -- leading to the
extensions.

See the Acronym Finder for many, many variations:
http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?String=on&Acronym=laughing

The Jargon File also suggests that some 'talk mode' inventions
actually date back to ham radio Morse code signals like this:
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/ko6gf/page2.html

If it truly is the "English language origin" you are looking for, you
are probably out of luck, other than citations the OED might have
itself for the separate phrase "laughing out loud".