Quote:
Originally Posted by samifan24
(Post 1477137)
I was trying to describe this stuff to a friend the other day. Does this sort of stuff have a name? I looked up hacker lingo and internet slang on Wikipedia but didn't see any references to these cat things. Anyone?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcats
Lolcats, a
compound of
lol and
cat[1], are
photos of cats with
humorous captions. They are a type of
image macro, and are thus also referred to as
cat macros. Lolcats are created for the purpose of
sharing them with others on
imageboards and other
internet forums, especially on Saturdays ("Caturdays").
[2]
Lolcat images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a caption characteristically formatted in a
sans serif font such as
Impact or
Arial Black.
[3] The image is, on occasion,
photoshopped for effect. The caption generally acts as a
speech balloon encompassing a
comment from the cat, or is a simple description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax
[3] featuring "strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar."
[4] These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of
pidgin[3] or
baby talk.
[5] The text is frequently in the form of a
snowclone parodying the grammar-poor
patois stereotypically attributed to
internet slang.
Lolcats are similar to other animal-based image macros, such as the
O RLY? owl and captioned pictures of walruses (lolruses), elephant seals, dogs, hamsters, birds, and rabbits.
[6] The format is popular enough to have spread to subjects as diverse as United States Presidents and
tapirs.
Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of snowclones where nouns and verbs are replaced in a phrase. Some phrases have a known source while others seem to be specific to the lolcat form.
Some common reoccuring phrases are:
- "im in yur X Yin' ur Z", a snowclone of "I'm in ur base killing ur doodz".
- "I can has X?"
- "oh hai, I has X'ed ur Y"
- "do not want", from an Engrish mistranslation of Darth Vader's shout of "nooooo!" from Star Wars: Episode III.
- "I has [a,an,teh] X"
- "invisible X"
- "I are X"
- "X has a flavor"
- "I made you [a,an] X, but I [ate,eated] it"
- "I see what you did there"
- "It's a trap"
/tk
