[Update 5: Buy a shirt!]

[Updates 3 & 4: See the transcript of the picture here and read about my responses to your responses, over there.]

[Update 2: In order to keep from being killed by bandwidth usage, I’ve moved the pics to a Picasa Web gallery. See it all here. Thanks.]

[Update: Welcome, all from teh interwebz! This has spread to quite a number of sites; I’m having trouble keeping up. The picture you’re looking for is at the bottom, after my breathless rambling. Thanks for stopping by.]

Here’s a bandwagon on which I can’t believe I’ve jumped. If you’re not familiar with the whole Lol cats (also known as kitty pidgin) meme: Wikipedia has the dry analysis. To see it in action, you should visit the foremost Lolcat repository, i can has cheezburger. Of course you’re going to want that five minutes of your life back—as well as the time spent reading this post.

“Lolcat is kind of like bad chat-room spelling and grammar taken to an extreme.”

Regardless of whether you went to those sites, I’m going to explain it anyway because that’s what I do. Lolcat is kind of like bad chat-room spelling and grammar taken to an extreme. It takes cues from meta-ironic 13375p3/\k, mistakes from typing too fast, and, as I said, bad chat-room grammar and over-aggressive use of abbreviations, and combines them with pictures of cute animals. Generally the intent is to be funny, although depending on what forum you’re on, it can be to ridicule some particularly dense post. What it turned into is kind of how you might imagine a cat talking, if cats could talk: tenuous grasp of the English language, nouns not matching verbs, phonetic spelling, etc.

I can’t say why I find it the least bit funny, seeing as how I’m not an animal person. I think it has to do more with being familiar with where it came from rather than what it is. You have to admit, it is pretty dumb.

Over time Lolcat itself has evolved. It’s been around for longer than a year, but only in the past few months has it really been talked about. When I first saw a “serious” post on Lolcats, I actually thought it was a joke. I was thinking to myself, “okay, nothing new here. People have been doing that forever.” (Forever in internet time is “about two years”.) Anyway, it suddenly caught on to where some newspaper published a real-life print article about it, and some other guy made up a Lolcat programming language, based on some canonical phrases, and some other guy made up the Laugh Out Loud Cats—a 1920’s-esque newspaper comic complete with backstory, purporting to be the originator of it all.

Personally, I can’t stand Lolcat as it’s written, or when it’s used in regular conversation. I know other people who can’t stand when I bust out 1337, so I suppose it’s just karma. The pictures (and bad typography that goes along with), make it a complete package that’s acceptable to me. But if you’re just typing along with no joke there—don’t do it. Please.

Which brings me to my next point. I’ve never used abbreviations online, even back in the day when I used to IM people, or in typing lengthy emails. I don’t get the point of shortening everything, probably because I type fast enough that it’s no extra work to actually write out the dang words. One thing in particular I’ve never understood is ‘lol’ for ‘laughing out loud’. Not only does it not actually relate to the action of laughing itself, it actually takes longer to type than if you’d just type out the laughing syllables (Hahaha). “Lol” is typed with one finger going back and forth on the “L” and the “O”—significantly slower than alternating right index and left pinky when typing “H”s and “A”s. Even worse, some people I know have extended this to be “lolololol” when they find something particularly funny which means absolutely nothing at all in terms of the original shorthand! I don’t get it. So I don’t use abbreviations.

All that to say that even though I don’t like Lolcat and the abbreviations which gave rise to its most idiosyncratic forms, I’m still fascinated by the whole process of what is, essentially, the formation of a new written language. It literally is a pidgin dialect of English. It’s not a serious one, but even in its wrong-ness, there is a correct and incorrect way of doing things. Someone can see it and say, “that’s not really lolcat”—as if incorrectly matching up nouns and their verbs could be more or less incorrect. But “fluent speakers”, if you will, can tell when someone’s trying too hard fake it. Even worse, there’s a range of accepted spellings—sometimes only complex words are misspelled, while other times simpler words are misspelled also, but within certain bounds. (Even the complex words have to be recognizable since no one is truly a native speaker, and we’re still trying to get a joke across). These various spellings are all acceptable, and largely dependent on the type of joke or message you’re trying to convey, i.e. younger cats “talk” with worse spelling. Anyway, all that to say that it’s really interesting to see how this has grown up, seemingly overnight, and so coherently (within its domain), as well.

Being called out as a non-fluent speaker: that was my biggest fear with this project. I think I did a pretty good job, but you’ll have to be the judge. (I took some liberties, too.) I was thinking about what I wrote in the previous paragraph, and came to the conclusion that if this really were a pidgin dialect, it should be possible to use the existing rules to translate any literary work into Lolcat. The choice was immediately clear: the Bible.

Of course, there’s only so much Lolcat I can put up with (it still annoys me, remember), so I just did enough to fill the first page. But I was successful in this, and there’s no reason you couldn’t do the entire thing. It would drive me completely insane. But it could be done.

Originally I was just going to post what I wrote, but then I got this crazy idea. I haven’t used Indesign in a while. I haven’t designed a page of type since college. For kicks, I’ll lay out what I wrote and make it look like an actual Bible! It was a simple enough matter to spec out the type in the Bible I have and mock up a page. I love how setting up a page of type and putting it in a book makes it look all authoritative. Even better: use a book which, itself, so many people take to be authoritative.

It’s a great mash-up combination: a Lolcat translation of Genesis, presented as an actual printed book and all the authority contained therein. When I showed it to my brother in real life, it looked close enough to the real thing that he thought someone had done the entire book, which I was holding in my hands. Perfect. I decided to photograph this typed page and post the photograph of the page, rather than just reposting what I had written. I think the presentation is what makes this work, because otherwise it’s just another run-of-the-mill Lolcats gag.

Not A Blog™ readers, I present Genesis Chapter 1 (and part of Chapter 2), New International Lolcat Translation. (Don’t miss my favorite: Chapter 1, verse 28.)

Pic moved to here.

-Ted

[Edit: This post and associated imagery do not fall under the Creative Commons License. They are copyright 2007, Ted Stoltz.]