Posted by: Eric Hacke | December 12, 2007

LOLCats are poetry

Like Haikus. They have a general format, and consistent style.

Wikipedia has the following on format:

These images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a large caption characteristically formatted in an uppercase sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black. The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax, featuring “strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar.”

These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin or baby talk. The text parodies the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to Internet slang. Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of snowclones in which nouns and verbs are replaced in a phrase. Some phrases have a known source while others seem to be specific to the lolcat form.

Common themes include jokes of the form “Im in ur noun, verb-ing ur related noun.” “I has a noun” pictures show a cat in possession of an object while “Invisible noun” show pictures of cats apparently interacting with said invisible object. “My noun, let me show you it/them” pictures are accompanied by cats apparently presenting or offering an object.

Another common lolcat displays a cat with a specific look, which is described by adjective, and the text, “[adjective] cat is not [adjective]“ or “Your offering pleases [adjective] cat.” A version of this is also stated as “adjective cat is not amused”, or “[adjective] cat has run out of [adjective]” (when the cat in related picture seems to be feeling the opposite of the adjective used to describe it.)

But all this is basically just a long way of getting around to showing this photo.

This one is good too.


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