Oh hai, howz u doin? Has u herd bout teh web siet calld icanhascheezburger.com wif picturez ov kats wif capshuns?
In case you didn’t catch that, have you heard about the Web site called icanhascheezburger.com, with pictures of cats with captions? If you haven’t heard about it, or seen random pictures forwarded in emails or posted to blogs or Facebook, then you must never go online.
The Web site itself is nothing new; it has been around since 2007 and is the largest of the blogs with lolcats, as they are called, on the Internet. What most people may not know is that lolcats has its own unique and intriguing culture.
The captions are usually written out in lolspeak, a variation of English where the supposed way animals would speak, if they were able, is written phonetically and with horrible grammar.
Not only is lolspeak used in the captions but also in the comments below the pictures where users share inside jokes, flirt, argue, play games, build friendships, become enemies and occasionally comment on the actual content.
As with any language, lolspeak has its own dictionary and grammar guides, but the loose guidelines are easily bendable to a person’s preference.
Only somewhat surprisingly, the Bible has been translated into lolspeak, featuring Ceiling Cat as God. Ceiling Cat is one of the more popular lolcats, which shows a cat looking through a hole in the ceiling. He has his own following with spin-off Web sites, groups on Facebook and his own Twitter account.
Passages from the lolcat Bible include Genesis 1:1 “Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.,” and John 3:16 “So liek teh Ceiling Kitteh lieks teh ppl lots and he sez ‘Oh hai I givez u me only kitteh and ifs u beleeves him u wont evr diez no moar, k?” Jesus is known as “Happy Cat” and Satan as “Basement Cat.”
In addition to everything already mentioned, other lolcat byproducts include books, music, stuffed animals, t-shirts, flash games and viral videos.
Lolcats have proven to be more than just a quick Internet fad. This is most likely because pictures of cats and words to go with them are seemingly endless, and a good portion of the time, the pictures are actually funny or entertaining. As for now, there seems to be no end to where lolcats will go.
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