lolcats linguistics
Frankly, I’ve never gotten into the whole Cute Overload phenomenon, probably because my interests run towards fewer vertebrae (preferably none) and more legs. What I do find fascinating is that people are actually thinking about the linguistic implications of lolcats and other image macros. For instance, Anil Dash observes that lolcats images have a consistent grammar:
Incorrect kitty pidgin jumped to my attention the first time I saw a reference to Dune being used with a lolcat image. The caption on the linked version of the image, “The spice must flow.” is fine, if not particularly cat-like. But the caption on the version I saw first was much more verbose: “I are dunecat. I controls the spice, I controls the universe.” Besides being an awkward attempt at overexplaining the punchline (I’ve never read Dune or seen the film, but the joke is obvious) this was just all wrong. The fact that we can tell no cat would talk like this shows that kitty pidgin is actually quite consistent.
Via Language Log and n8