Joe Carter has a post (of some sort) titled, Pop Semiotics: Cat Macros as Communication. (note: I used to think that Joe was a very busy man... now I'm not so sure)
As Joe writes,
As the Wikipedia entry explains, lolcats-- a portmanteau of "lol" and "cat"--are photos of cats with comedic captions created for the purpose of sharing with others on imageboards and other internet forums. The caption is characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black, usually in white letters with a black outline. (In fact, this type of lettering has come to define the genre, so much so that the use of other fonts and colors seem like a violation of an unwritten aesthetic code.) The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax featuring strangely-conjugated verbs. Despite the odd construction, the syntax has, as Anil Dash notes in a post on the topic, a "fairly consistent grammar."
Okay. Check out the art images for yourself. And then check out my post on A.R.T. Syndrome (especially the section on TARTS).
One new bit of information I got out of the post was the phrase "leetspeak", defined as, [a] written form of slang used primarily on the Internet, but becoming increasingly common in many online video games, which uses various combinations of alphanumerics to replace proper letters. An example of leetspeak is the "word" Pr0n, which is defined as,
Leet slang for p*rn*graphy. This is a deliberately inaccurate spelling/pronunciation for p*rn, where a zero is often used to replace the letter O. It is sometimes used in legitimate communications (such as email discussion groups, Usenet, chat rooms, and internet web pages) to circumvent language and content filters, which may reject messages as offensive or spam.
Okay. Just for grins, now check out my old post on
$Þǻm dε†эc†iδή
I think you'd appreciate this comic:
http://xkcd.com/c262.html
Posted by: LotharBot | May 23, 2007 at 10:50 PM