A Blog About Making Culture
Cats Can Has Grammar
April 23, 2007
If you spend any time at all observing net culture, then you'll have been unable to miss the recent explosion in popularity of lolcats. This relatively recent phenomenon is the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and overlaying absurdist captions on the images.
The core behavior has existed for some time; "Image macro" is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon.
- I'M IN UR X Ying your Z. This construct, based on i'm in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures.
- Invisible Item. Variations on the seminal Invisible Bike, these are images of cats, usually in midair, with captions that prompt us to fill in imaginary objects or actions that complete the scene. There's something brilliant to these images, speaking to our mind's ability to intuitively extrapolate unseen details.
- Kitty Pidgin. And finally, the newly dominant lolcats, of the family I Can Has Cheezeburger? These seem to be spawning nearly infinite variations, and have exploded in popularity since being named "lolcats" instead of the more general "image macro" or "cat macro".
The rise of these new subspecies of lolcats are particularly interesting to me because "I can has cheezeburger?" has a fairly consistent grammar. I wasn't sure this was true until I realized that it's possible to get cat-speak wrong.
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.
I was having a conversation with Ben and Ben a few weeks ago where I suggested this consistent grammar for lolcats could be a "cweeole". Knowing a bit more about such things now, I realize this isn't a creole but more likely a pidgin language, used to help cats talk to humans. And since "pidgin" is already a cutesy spelling of a mispronunciation, there doesn't seem to be any really cute way to rename it to reflect its uniqueness. "Kitty pidgin" might be the closest thing we have to a name for this new language.
There's a consistent visual vocabulary to the construct, as well. If it ain't Impact or Arial Black or some other nondescript sans serif font, it ain't lolcat. White letters with a black outline are a must. But codifying a design guide for lolcats is well beyond my abilities.
Unfortunately, the evolution of these grammars online can be very difficult to track down; This kind of nascent web culture is generally frowned upon by Wikipedia (witness the deletion of the I'm in ur base article since the Ask MetaFilter thread just a few months ago) and there are no other sites designed to collect definitive collaborative reference material. It's going to take time to document kitty pidgin with any degree of accuracy.
I've just started bouncing the idea of kitty pidgin off of Erin and Grant, two of my favorite word experts, but I'm confident that someday we'll have kitty pidgin dictionaries. Perhaps we'll even get all the niceties that Klingon and Elmer Fudd-speak enjoy, like a Google translation, a Microsoft Word dictionary, or a cat-native version of the Bible or Shakespeare.
I has a links
Okay, go out and look at some of the finest kitty-related content:
- Kitty pidgin's already made its way into business communications -- our last LiveJournal news post had lots of references to our team-up with Photobucket under the heading "We has a Photobucket". I was especially proud of my quick-and-dirty PhotoShop work in that thread.
- Gordon McNaughton's created a LolCat Build(e)r. A fantastic and essential app, though I have to take issue with the use of CamelCase InterCaps in the word "lolcat".
- Cute Overload is likely the seminal site for taking the "cute culture" aspect of online behavior seriously. Meg Frost always has fun with the content, but I haven't seen any high-profile definitive collections of these genres that predate Cute Overload.
- Choire Sicha is a genius, but if you needed more proof, you can now just head to lolgays.com to be redirected to his Gawker post on lolgays. It's exactly what you think it is.
Update: This post has gotten an amazing reaction, and inspired a number of follow-up posts, including a look at MeowChat and PetSpeak and my thoughts on Cats, Comics and Closure. I've also collected responses to the popularity of lolcats in a few posts:
- Inadvertent Lazymeme Clearinghouse Lamentations shows some of the best early responses to the meme
- Pidginholed shows lolcats gaining popularity in mainstream media, including a Houston Chronicle cover story
- And perhaps most amusingly, The LOL Street Journal marks the milestone of lolcats making their way, yes, into the Wall Street Journal.
- If you enjoy this sort of stuff, you'll want to join me at ROFLCon, an event being held at Harvard just to celebrate silly online memes like lolcats.
Previously: Pidgins and Creoles
Next: MeowChat and PetSpeak
O'Reilly Radar
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Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar: http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/04/23/cats_can_has_gr... read more »AKMA’s Random Thoughts
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Inadvertent Lazymeme Clearinghouse Lamentations: Following up on Cats, Comics and Closure, Meowchat and PetSpeak (which, surprisingly, came up during a panel on race and class on Friday), and of course Cats can has grammar, I've rediscovered the bizarre things that happen after a couple hundred thous... read more »the evangelical outpost
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“Kidgin”, surely. There is the possibility of confusing it with a pidgin for children, but “kittgin”, while it reads more clearly as something related to kitties, urges the pronunciation “kiht-jin” instead of “kih-jin”.
And speaking of combining sci-fi language and lolcats language, a pug.
Mark Bean
Don’t forget http://Threadbombing.com (slightly NSFW)
Jeremy Zawodny
Ah, posts like this are exactly why I read your blog. I hope you write a book on internet culture someday. :-)
Oh, wait… you’re kinda doing that now. We just have to assemble it on our own.
David Ely
Do check out We3 to see a ruthless cyborg cat speaking thusly.
Collection of all three issues on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/2qd2v2
A few images of the animal speak in this interview: http://www.newsarama.com/pages/DC/We3.htm
Danny
Actually, kitty pidgin has a long and fine history: I’d imagine that it’s a descendant (either direct, or rediscovered) of meowchat.
Meowchat was the pidgin that cats talked to other cats on the usenet group rec.pets.cats, until the owners on that group got incredibly annoyed with them, and voted to split the group into rec.pets.cats (which consisted of humans talking about cats), and rec.pets.cats.community (which, ostensibly, was cats posting about humans).
http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/meow_faq.htm gives a reasonably good breakdown of that story, though unfortunately in heavily accented meow.
cheezburger
Hi Anil, thank you for explaining why we’re so enjoyable! Lol* ar a very interesting phenomena!
Undertoad
Many of these come from the community 4chan. macrochan.org serves as the ultimate taxonomy for all such images from 4chan, and it is an awesome thing to behold. Don’t miss the “I has a bucket” walruses.
Eliot
Although Wikipedia isn’t a friendly place for this info, Encyclopædia Dramatica very much is. http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/
liza
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL snif LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
dude!
you lolcatted me into conniptions. i don’t know who’s the biggest nerd : you for writing the post or me for laughing AND agreeing that indeed, it is a kitgin and not cweeole.
Asbjørn Ulsberg
Didn’t this type of language originally stem from the combination of 1337-speak and “All your base are belong to us”? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allyourbasearebelongtous
dave mcclure
i can has erudite blog?
nice.
Gordon
I second the authoritative nature of Encyclopedia Dramatica for all things that Wikipedia won’t allow: http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/
Kingsley Joseph
im in ur blogz typing u commentz.
PS: You should write that book Jeremy’s talking about. I’ll even tolerate a chapter on Prince!
JD
I has thankz 4 ur halp
/pd
but therein is the value for the next generation of speech.. similar to iminlikewithyou.com !!!
The value chain is propagating itself to generation that we don’t understand fully because we are not part of it.
I think companies are moving to attract and understand this space, is by recruiting new age talent ..
this clip sez it all. Anil maybe you should visit CVlabs and then blog your finding on this trend.
http://www.vimeo.com/clip:173714
btw, great post !! :)-
Kurtis
99% of these macros came from 4chan.org. The other one percent came from somebody that saw a picture that was originally at 4chan.org, and decided to try to imitate that picture. Please, know your sources. Also, the dunecat and spice reference is a completely different cat meme. Look up “the spice must flow” at macrochan.org.
Marce
“there are no other sites designed to collect definitive collaborative reference material”
Incorrect! See urbandictionary.com :)
rod townsend
gay minds think alike: http://lolgay.com
clapika
very good post
Panic
A++. Would lol again.
skif dank
sweet article
raincoaster
As Townsend said, Lolgay.com lives. They’re in ur internets, stylin ur home page.
marie
obviously, it should be cat pigeon. as in “i spoke cat pigeon. but i eated it.”
BH Lombardy
hmm… no one ever seen ceiling cat? www.ceilingcat.com ? Doesnt have the grammar/spelling feature, but it wouldnt surprise me if this is the start of the trend.
Anonymous
The “cat-speak” of which you speak seems to stem from two earlier image macros which did NOT feature cats: “I has a shuvel” (http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Ihasa_shuvel) and another one featuring a small hamster which reads “I has a seed.”
Anonymous
From what I’ve observed, image macro culture seems to have stemmed primarily from www.4chan.org (or more likely, it’s Japanese predecessor) and it’s associated websites.
I personally wouldn’t take any study of internet culture seriously if it didn’t mention the -chan websites.
However, before you visit, equip yourself with brain bleach.
Like a heap of other people in this thread, I recommend www.encyclopediadramatica.com, as well as lurking moar.
yoyoyoyyoIG
Hey, how about next time you cite where you got that picture instead of taking it off my YTMND, and uploading it to photobucket. Assholes.
teddlesruss
You gots the bucket right, anyway - subgenre of lolcats is the walrus/bucket/cat eternal triangle. “Takes my bucket, I dares ya!” and “Oh Mr Walrus! I gots a bucket!”
Oh and the goggles. I predict a goggle meme expressing in lolcat pidgin any time soon now…
tinycat
While I’d rather not attract more attention to 4chan, I don’t like miscredit. Most all internet cat macros involving this sort of thing, and many of the other kinds, come from 4chan. Where every saterday (called caterday there) people make and post and repost these as a tradition thats has been going on for quite some time. Many things can be found on ytmnd also (which is more or less 4chan with sound). SA could possibly have had some hand in it as well.
In fact, those 3 above sites are responsible for most non-commercial (english)net culture.
Luthe
Have you been here? It’s the most comprehensive collection of cat macros on the web, I think.
Also, don’t listen to tinycat. There are countless sources of web culture, even if it’s not his culture. Livejournal and fandom_wank spawn plenty of catchphrases on their own.
Betsy Devine
LOL Anil! UR in Wikipedia, bein authoritativ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat
tinycat
Luthe, I count those as commercial, LJ at least. And many things spawned there where actually spawned elsewhere.
Thats a pretty nifty link, lots of cats there. Note the frequent caterday references ;)
Things leak out of ‘my’* culture and show up on the greater internets. Take the o rly owl, which is a combination of SA (where talking in instant messenger shorthand became a joke) and a 4chan owl-day, where with mine own eyes did I see its birth.
While you can attempt to track down things beginnings as far as their first appearance, that is not very dependable as things travel very fast on the internet, rather look at the individual elements of the thing, and realize where these things come together on the internet. Then you get a good idea of where something really came from.
*Besides, its not really ‘my’ culture, i don’t even like SA or YTMND
Susan Reynolds
And to think that I thought my thought processes were odd. This is the kind of gem that proves we’re all connected in some kind of weird geekdom that other humans just shake their heads at.
Since I can’t adopt you I’m at least nudging you up the ladder of my must reads. Insights and insanity appeal to me in a big way.
Kosmonaut
I tried to create pages for IM IN UR BASE KILLIN UR D00DZ and FridgeCat on Wikipedia last year, but the Wiki editors deleted them. Now that the Lolcat meme is taking off, they can’t say no!
james
i’m in your 4chanz making all your culture? i think tracing all internet culture to 4chan, SA and YTMND is about as realistic as saying ‘everything on japanese tv is anime’ or ‘anime is better than all those other animation and live action styles.’
jason
fail.
as the other commenters have said, this meme is largely from the great crucible of internet memedom, 4chan. being on 4chan is like watching memes be born, and then usually quickly die, save the few that persevere. take your culture commentaary to 4chan—that’s an article i’d like to see.
Sir Michael Foley, 16th Baron of Xternetsa
With the powers vested in me as the 16th Baron of Xternetsa, I hereby declare that it is not possible to get cat grammar wrong at all. As a cunning linguist myself, I am very well aware of the limitations of language - and as a Baron, I have the power to expand those limitations whenever I see fit.
nv
http://static.twitter.com/system/maintenance/index.html
(I hope this stays put.)
marc
LOL!
1337 haxxor loves dis!
The Amnesiac
Great post, but I have to disagree with you on one point. IMO, the only way to get kitty pidgin “wrong” is to make it not-funny, and what is and isn’t funny is entirely subjective. The dunecat picture, for example, is one of my favorite ones, and everybody that I’ve shown it to thinks it’s hilarious.
The Pageman
Remember when Twitter accidentally deleted (…sure) Techrunch’s account? They probably saw a lot of these lolcats:
http://twitter.com/The+Mark+1
Anil
Hi Pageman, I’m sitting here with a couple of the guys from Twitter, and as I suspected, they didn’t actually deliberately delete anybody’s account. I think it’s stupid to suggest they would.
But I do sees lolcats!
Undercover Black Man
“Cweeole”? “Kitty pidgin”? I prefer to think of this patois as “catois.”
Undercover Black Man
“Cweeole”? “Kitty pidgin”? I prefer to think of this patois as a “catois.”
Kol Ra'ash Gadol
…suggested this consistent grammar for lolcats could be a “cweeole”.
Well, although you decided that it’s not a creole but a pidgin, I think it couldn’t be a “cweeole” anyway - perhaps a “twee-ole”
Caroline Jack
^5 for the “i has a photobucket” pic.
Anonymous
This is ridiculous, as already mentioned, AT LEAST 99% of all these images are creation of 4chan.org
Anonymous becomes enraged everytime some silly website decides to call these macro their own and some even have the audacity to watermark them, even to the extreme of DDoSing said websites. No, not a threat of any sort, just to show how much Anonymous loves his cats. God knows why cats are so loved, I guess they’re just too cute even for the Anonymous collective.
I think Anonymous would be able to sleep better at night if credit was given to us. Where’s the common decency? :(
Anonymous
racial kitty talk http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/broccoli.jpg
Corgi
I think a ‘Cheezburger’ commenter named it ‘Mangleslang’; on Cute Overload their particular dialect is ‘Snorglish’. :)
Fabiollo
The evolution of these grammars online can be very difficult to track down… true, but encyclopedia dramatica can be very useful.
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Iaminyourbasekillingyour_d00ds
catnip
amazingly, there wasn’t a lolcats group on flickr, so we set one up: lolcats
unsurprisingly, to start with there were lots of pictures lifted from elsewhere on the web, but the nice thing is that more and more people are starting to make their own.
Jon
This sounds uncomfortably like ebonics and is therefore racist. >:(
evs
I think you are missing the point Sigmund, It was originally created because a) it was funny and b) see a) All the internet ‘phenomenons’ tend to spring up due to this reason. People find it amusing and send it to their friends. People wont learn from it, people wont cite it as modern examples of art or literature in the 21st Century and in a year or two it becomes so blase that it fizzles out quickly.
There’s no need to look for a difficult answer when in fact its very simple and there for all to see.
IT R TEH FUNNEHZ.
Thanks for reading.
karan
Your point on grammar? It’s about to get even better: lolcode
Comedy Blog
<< I’M IN UR X Ying your Z. This construct, based on i’m in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures. >>
This is what is known as a “Snowclone”
Anonymous
This was great! I loved reading this (and laughed myself silly, too).
matt
Hi Anil, I’ve just put up the first version of my lolcat translator. I’d be interested to know what you think… http://speaklolcat.com
Russell Heimlich
Weird.. I too just launched a LOL translator at http://www.txt2lol.com/
weird…
Hortense Zvonimira
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my cas. Hortense Zvonimira.
lolcats
LOL the cats are funnyz!
Anonymous
Don’t forget Ape Lad’s great comic series based on LOLcat memes.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/apelad/1529187838/
KJK::Hyperion
“I made you a cookie but I eated it” comes from yet another source, emo artist Jeff “Azuzephre” Thomas: http://www.ponandzi.com/image.php?img=12. One of few memes inspired by DeviantArt pieces (do you recognize this fellow? http://ursulav.deviantart.com/art/The-Biting-Pear-of-Salamanca-29677500)
Stephen Hilderbrand
Does lolcat share the same lineage as gollum’s language? There does appear to be a link, though I haven’t put my linguistic hat on to say anything intelligent about it.
For instance, utterances such as “We hateses hobbitses!” seem awfully close to lolcat.
trademark registration
This is such a funny post. Who knew there was a whole cat-grammar movement going on. Ha! =)
Anne Kaelber
Have you seen the lolcat bible?
http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
I advise keeping the soda can far from the keyboard while reading. grin
Anne.
PamC 
What about the term “lingua lolcat”?
Mike
Not sure if anyone has pointed this out yet - have you seen lolcode.com yet? :) It’s an adaptation of “kitty pidgin” into a programming language.
Anonymous
http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
There’s your cat native bible translation.
jewellery
I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER is probably the most popular and famous animal caption thingie with great grammar. The few times I’ve gone there, it’s been great. By the way, I don’t think DuneCat was an overexplanation of the joke. The “I controls the Spice, I controls the universe” makes it funny. If it was just “I are Dunecat” it would be funny, but the whole thing of controlling fits in well with the way cats are. They think they own the universe. Wouldn’t be surprised if every cat goes around saying “I are DuneCat!”
jewellery
I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER is probably the most popular and famous animal caption thingie with great grammar. The few times I’ve gone there, it’s been great. By the way, I don’t think DuneCat was an overexplanation of the joke. The “I controls the Spice, I controls the universe” makes it funny. If it was just “I are Dunecat” it would be funny, but the whole thing of controlling fits in well with the way cats are. They think they own the universe. Wouldn’t be surprised if every cat goes around saying “I are DuneCat!”
Ryan
I’ve become more accustomed to calling it just plain old “LOLcat”. It seems like a viable name for the language/variety, to me!
Stephen
Someone Twittered this post to me earlier today. You put a good deal of thought into this, so I thought it was a good article. One thing I found: the second to last link about the LOL Street Journal has a bunch of HTML code in it, making the link broken. Just thought I’d let you know. Keep up the good work!
nico
You’re featured on thinkgeek!
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/popculture/a359/
Alastair
The increasingly popular comic XKCD has made reference to the lolcat phenomenon.
http://xkcd.com/262/
coisepants
jezebel.com has been running a regular feature called lolvogue fo for a while - they put kitteh speak over fashion editorials. It becomes a playful commentary on/protest against vogue’s often painful hegemony over standards of beauty - often the models are saying “no can haz cheeseburger” or are “too tard” to model - (perhaps because they must deny themselves food to be in those pages). It also boldly points out how objectified and dehumanized these women are, by associating them with kitteh speak, and therefore the sub-human, rather than with standard “normal” english.
Archives of these posts are at http://jezebel.com/search/lolvogue/
Check it out. It’s an all too rare feminist appropriation of an internet phenomenon. Funny, too.
Oil Portrait paintings
This is a very timely article. With the advent of lolcat trend, I must admit as a pet portrait artist that business in terms of painting animal portraits has become a bit difficult for us. The competition with people producing lolcat-related items is so stiff. They can produce items faster and in a more attractive way than us no matter how personalized we claim our paintings are.
Nate
There is a lolcat bible. http://lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
jp&t
I haz knowledge of caturday. I controls the Internetz.
- jp
krsmzn urydmxi
ifnq ibtv sepg pdwaosnqi hderqxbz poifk twmp
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