David Cameron must long ago have stopped signing off texts to friends with ‘LOL’. In internet slang, of course, it means ‘laughing out loud’, not ‘lots of love’ as he’d thought. Yes, we all scoffed when the story emerged — but how many of the scoffers know that in bridge, LOL means something else entirely: it stands for ‘Little Old Lady’.
True: the term is sexist, ageist, and all the rest of it. But if we’re honest, we can all picture the type of elderly lady who whiles away her afternoons playing bridge and is, as they say, easy game. On the other hand, be careful of judging by appearances: bridge famously keeps the brain sharp, and there are plenty of dangerously astute octogenarians out there. Terence Reese used to enjoy telling the story of how the great Adam ‘Plum’ Sykes was bluffed out of a spade contract by a LOL, and complained afterwards: ‘She had an enormous bag of knitting! How was I to know she was going to psyche?’
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