A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney – L337 Katz0rz
Thanks to David McRaney for his submission. You can visit his site, Zero Sum Mind, here. 
I keep sane by having a kaleidescope of friends who make sense of reality in drastically differing ways, often in total opposition to each other.
If you spend/have spent as much time as I do/have online, you begin to sense some of the latent functions of this medium. The Internet (yes, it is capitalized according to the Associated Press Stylebook) is the true melting pot, the true mixing bowl of subcultures and deviance. Out of it have emerged new
cultures.
Sure, people self-segregate, but for people like myself this just makes it easier to buzz from flower to flower. I love to visit the Furries and the Kirk/Spock gay erotic art groups, the Bible thumpers and the body modifiers.
Sociologists must go through a lot of pants when they cruise the digital realm because subcultures are constantly spawning subcultures to the point there is a sort of electronic gravy made from all these people meeting online and simmering in the juices of screen-to-screen communication.
Leetspeak and macros are two of … (click to read the rest)… my favorite aspects of Internet-specific subcultures.
Like most Web-based subcultures, shared aspects arise in places where people interact the most directly – forums, social networking websites, chatrooms and Web 2.0 incarnations.
Strangely enough, though American culture is far less literate than in previous decades, we read all day long and communicate through written language possibly more than ever so in history. Words are the currency of text messaging, emails, blogs and websites. This may or may not be a good thing, considering how our communications within these arenas are so economical and utilitarian. The long-form, eloquent email is a rare bird in the cyberjungle.
Still, a fusion of sorts between learned, direct language and rapid, practical digital missives takes place with Leetspeak and macros. Both relay a great deal of information in a small burst of code. Each depends on the receiver of the information having working knowledge of the culture and its references. In a sense, these serve as argots, and help identify both sides of the information transfer as belonging to the subculture where they appear. The in-joke is part of the communication. The separation of ingroup and outgroup helps drive the rapid evolution of both leetspeak and macros.
Although leetspeak has been around for a while, it has mutated into several formats, thus creating a continuum of Internet prose. At its most basic, leetspeak is pure written language slang originally used to get ideas across faster than spelling out commonly used terms like, “away from keyboard,” which became AFK. Over time, usage of the acronym allowed for descriptive expressions like “He’s gone AFK.”
At the high-end, elitist leetspeak features letters and numbers mixed together and references to computer hacking skills are applied to everyday life; at the low end, cute terms used in text messaging and MySpace are filled mainly with acronyms for common phrases.
High-End Example: p43ar my l337 sk11lz0rz!!!1!!1
Translation: You should be fearful of my powerful computer hacking abilities.
Fear = p43ar; elite = l337; skill = sk11lz0rz.
Notice also the exclamation points include intentional errors simulating the furious smashing of the 1 key while holding shift to get the ! symbol. Someone really going crazy on the !!!!! often misses a shift press in there somewhere. Other words commonly used like “pwnd” follow the same architecture. If you defeated someone at a video game, you might exclaim the slang term, “owned!” This word has its own evolution, but once it enters into the leetspeak lexicon, it gets a new life. People rapidly typing “owned” during online game play commonly missed the o on the keyboard and typed “pwned” instead. Eventually, this became the preferred spelling along with “pwnd.” Now, there are several derivatives of the word including the state of defeat as delivered by the utterer of, “Pwnage.”
In the beginning, the whole phrase depends on your understanding of not just the language, but the etymology’s of its terms and symbols. After repeated uses, the etymology no longer matters, just as it doesn’t in normal, common English. The difference with leetspeak is how it evolves at a rapid pace so it may remain fresh and full of in-jokes and references. There is a non-directed, systemic quality to leetspeak encouraging people to play with it, experiment and add. With leetspeak, we have finally created a written language where the rules of slang are dominant.
If you have ever heard someone say “l-o-l,” enunciating each letter one at a time, you have heard the the pitter patter of the next steps in human language and this article. People go so far as say the three letters as a word,”Lol,” or “Lawl.”
Leetspeak hinges on it being read and not spoken. But, as people spend more time online, and spend more time with others who also spend time online, it becomes acceptable to maintain in group status by using leetspeak in spoken form. Thus, I’ve heard people say (phonetically) “pawnage,” “powned,” “pawned,” “p-owned,” and so on.
Ok, thanks for keeping up. Here comes the kicker.
This has a cyclical quality as well. Eventually, these spoken versions of leetspeak are reintroduced into the written language of the Internet. Often, it goes something like this:
Someone uses lol, which turns into the spoken “l-o-l,” which then becomes “lol” but sounds like “lawl,” and at some point someone in a forum thread, in response to something funny, puts up an image of Lal, the name of Data’s daughter from a single, obscure “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode. It’s a big inside joke on several levels, and the creator gets golf claps for pulling together all these references into one simple understatement. Everyone who gets it belongs in the ingroup, and the behavioral cycle is encouraged and repeated.
The image macro is born out of this cycle.
Forums typically put new posts underneath older ones. So, a direct response to someone’s rant about the coming police state in America may be immediately followed by an image of Captain America crying. Everyone gets the reference and the idea. This is a very high-level, metacommunication format.
Consider how difficult is its for computers to identify faces. Consider how confirmation keys are now images so computers can’t understand what is being communicated. Consider the new confirmation keys where a series of images are displayed and the user must pick which one of these is not like the other. Computers have a terrible time with this kind of task.
Communication through images is a powerful way to pass complex ideas back and forth. You see Captain America crying, and you understand a concept that would take several paragraphs of exposition.
So, image macros have really blossomed online in the last few years. Many of them take a slant on an existing meme circulating across the Internet. Of course, most of them are also designed to make you laugh along with solidifying in group status and also getting a point across.
For instance:
<– Someone is being overly dramatic.
Someone has posted something you would like to see more of. –> 
<– Someone is being a dick.
These image macros influence new written leetspeak, which in turn influences new spoken leetpeak and new macros. All of this churns at a rapid pace and evolves with each new generation. Eventually, something like the lolcats comes along and splinters the whole language schema into a new branch where all new in jokes, references and acceptable formats are born.
Lolcats are image macros featuring cats captioned with a specific form of language, one with no definitive label as of yet. I’ve seen it referred to as Kittahh and Kitteh before, but nothing has stuck. A clinical term, kitty pidgin, has also been coined because there seems to be some sort of order to the way sentences are constructed. The language may also derive from Meowchat, an IRC group who used to use similar diction when pretending to be cats online.
The phrase is usually white text with a solid black outline, and the grammar is consistently awful, as if the cat was trying to speak English but just couldn’t get the conjugation right. Some have suggested these macros were inspired by the old cat inspirational poster, “Hang in there.” Others suggest these simply fall into place with a long history of using anthropomorphized animals to get our kicks. These macros are used like any other, but for some reason, these have struck a chord and are mutating at an alarming rate. Now, there are several subgenres of Lolcats including:
In addition to the subgenres, new offshoots of the Lolcats adhering to the same grammar rules are spawning:
Each subgenere and offshoot influences the others laterally, and the in jokes and references generated by the lolcats appear across the whole universe of macros. Some seem to have storylines. Some are direct responses to previous macro postings. For example, an invisible sandwich might soon be followed by a visible one.
Perhaps this chart will help to make sense of this.
The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades.
It also demonstrates how the Internet changes the way we connect and communicate. These words and macros depend on the users manipulating not only the information being passed back and forth, but the format of the codes we agree on to represent the information. Strunk and White would probably be appalled, but then again, maybe not.
After all, a single image of a cat being struck by the sudden realization of how all this connects is the ultimate in clean, succinct and direct dialog.
ICHC = macros n’ cheez.. werdy comfert foodz..
I understanz! Frankz. How iz duin da kitteh speech? Iz gud! Yes? Noah?
hehe.. i read david’s post and loved it. thanks for being a sport david… ya’all should check out his stuff… good brain food.
was about time someone looked at this from a linguistic point of view, i guess. very interesting.
lingwistix ftw! ;D
Are this an important issue today? A sad lady
it r importin two teh lolpeepz anyway. mutsh uv vot we awl duz r nawt importin two otehrs, awr nawt eefin importin at awl. iz okay — wateffer maek yu happi r importin two yu.
doan be sad, fynd wot maek yu happi. mae ai sujess: (1) kittehs (2) cheezbergerz
Simply brilliant article. I rememeber having to google “HappyCat” because I was curious about the origin of his image, and why it was so popular in webculture.
But nows I just go back to lookin at pitchurs of kittehs…
You’d think, the American kittehs being around us so much, they could pick up on the complex rules of English grammar…
I wonder…what lolcats would sound/read like in another language?
“Estoy en soo ‘rador, comiendo su comeeda”
Great idea!… but lolspañol would be conjugated wrong (as well as having numerous other errors)
thus:
“Yo esta en soo ‘rador, comendendo sus comeedos”
Rig8t meow mai hed hurtz frum sooooo muchos lea4n.
Mebe nxt taim u g8t joke? bai meow!!!!!!!1!!!1!
Bt the way, I love the american lifestile and lived there, in califonia, a few years. Just womderful. Of cause a want to go back. maby live there for a while again. yes I would. sofia
morr kittehs, lez artickles plz thx
[...] w górę i dół, lolcats średnie. Przeczytałam ostatni wpis. Ciekawy link… nie zdzierżę… [...]
Il gatto lungo es luuuuungo
LOL, that was a great post!
Keep it up
I found this analysis to be absolutely fascinating – thanks for posting it!
me too XD
submitted for your approval: http://lolpresident.com/
Many big wordz. Make head go spin like newklear kitteh.
o hai, this r intrstng stuf! Luv teh dyagramm! k bai now
Oh hai, I haz onlie wun pikki – iz da dangd greengrozerz postrofee in da fraze: “but the etymology’s of its terms and symbols”…. it shud be “the etymologies of its terms and symbols”…. nawt pozessuv, k.
And dat iz kuz I iz teh überpikki abowt dem greengrozerz poztrofeez. I hateses dem wif passhinz, kthx.
I jellis dat I no wrytez such klevar dissartayshin.
Koodoz to Davidmcraney. 
Him gots 1337 sk1llz wif da subkulchur ov teh intarwebbingz. 
yayz.
I ztop be pikki nowe, an zay, dis a fabulis artikul.
elfinugget rite, dis fabblus artikle, yeh.
ai wit yoo on dat postrofee ting. ai cans has reel fit ovar dat, tooo. nawt gud fur brane funcshun.
Langwijnerd sez: This post is full of win. And speshul propz 4 bein the orijin of lolrusbukkets, apparently now a subgenre all their own.
I assume this is being added to Wikipedia, in the lolrus genere
i luvs beean roun smartz pepl.
I thought this was an interesting examination of online communication and the constant morphing of language.
You could say I hearted it.
Bored.
You’ve raised some very good points, but the reason I stopped to comment was to THANK YOU OMG for not doing this all in lolcat speek. Rather than the five minutes or so it took me to skim through this (I have work in ten minutes. Back off! I’ll read the whole thing later) I probably would have just given it up as a bad job and maybe come back later when I had six hours.
Again, good analysis!
pouffechats
(”pouffer” de rire means to lol.)
Mmmm. That was delicious.
I need to start logging in!
This is awesome, I’m gonna show it to my linguistics professor.
[...] L’article entier dans la suite. L337 Katz0rz [...]
This was awesome. I wanted to try and tackle the same subject, but David did a better job than I ever could have.
Nicely done and very interesting!
I really like the I HAS A PIFANEE! pic.
Thank you. This article assuaged my English major side that is appalled when I speak kitteh.
Iz all hokay now.
Jammies: I understand! Has degree English Lit, but husband and me speak LOLCAT each other. Now we say “go see kitteh!”
LOL
kthxbai!
Me, I just love that there exists a chart with “Harbls” on it.
[...] love seeing academic stuff tossed at online phenomena — like this sort of sociological/linguistic analysis of lolcats via I Can Has [...]
I’m gonna save this… I teach freshman composition, and I was actually thinking about talking about kitteh speak in class next semester… now I DEFINITELY am
(And it’s scary to me that I know which movie and scene that Nicholas Cage shot is from.)
Absolutely awsum article! Re: offshoots – Just as “Invisible ____” often leads to “Visible ____” you’ll find that “I Has A ______” can foster the venerable offshoot “_____ Has Me!”
[...] A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney – L337 Katz0rz [...]
holy crap too much text.
but it was a good read, looking at this from a linguistic point of view is a good idea. its baffled me for a while how all this happens.
So when do we start the human to kitteh dictionary?
I’m working three jobs right now so it would be hard for me to do. I have livestock to take care of too.
A bit of fun etymology: The term “Image Macro” originally came from online forums (I think the SomethingAwful Forums specifically) where there were a few images that expressed common ideas that you could include in a post, essentially like a smiley. The most famous one was timeline, used when someone was repeating old news or old ideas, etc. It was eventually overused to the point where it was removed from the forums, but the concept of the image macro expanded until it was used to refer to any image with text to humorously and succinctly make a point.
Brilliant! Bravo! And the “kitty pidgin” link gives us the even more brilliant and amazing Anil Dash piece, which among other things does us the enormous service of pointing out that it’s possible to get it wrong (nota bene, posters who have assumed kitteh pidgin
is just a matter of turning every syllable into hyper-cutesy baby-talk, regardless of whether any self-respecting kitteh would talk that way). Props also to demented_pants for the very good point that lengthy passages in kitteh pidgin are unreadable; to YOli for raising the question of how the gatos, chats, and others might do this (and for always using the KP judiciously and elegantly!); to Elfi for a good catch with “etymology’s” (though I continue to feel her particular argot is not really kitteh pidgin as it ought to be deployed); to terry g who made me pouffe de rire (chats-eclats?); and to Susanna who I wish had been *my* Freshman Comp teacher. Yays!
I really, really enjoyed this. Thanks for posting it.
“WTF, “The Offspring” is not an obscure TNG ep!” says the Geek Girl.
Data: I can has ur memreez when u diez?
Don’t forget that there are now lolbees and lolbrarians as well. (They’re at http://community.livejournal.com/lolbrarians/ and http://community.livejournal.com/lol_bees/)
Otherwise, this was awesome.
SarahD : You are correct, there are NO obscure TNG or Trk eps.
Jammies – ditto
OMG, thats so funny! “i eated newklear” XD XD XD!…but the poor kidden! is that real???? V_V
uuuummmmm….whut?….. jk purty cool
I love the comment about your friends – may I quote you?
Quote away.
Most excellent post. Hmmm. Does that make us, ICHC and The Argotnats?
Airudyte an ful of win!
Analissez be for wins and teh funs!
I hrted this artikle. FOW
Lurv it! Made me weep a little. And cats use bad grammar out of spite–it’s a fact!
[...] A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney – L337 Katz0rz Thanks to David McRaney for his submission. You can visit his site, Zero Sum Mind, here. [image] I keep sane by having […] [...]
[...] edumakated fancy-pants talk about LOLCats in “A Special In-Depth Analysis” at [...]
[...] MOAR! [...]
[...] I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? » Blog Archive A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney – L337 Katz0rz … see? there’s sociological value to lolcats. I told you… (tags: lolcats caturday linguistics sociology web) [...]
Great reading. If I may be so bold, shouldn’t the “O RLY?” owl figure into your chart somewhere? Perhaps between “Image Macros” and “LOLcats”?
4chan.org & macrochan.org
:
the refinery & the database
YOU FORGOT MY FAVORITE INJOKE!!!!11!!!!1!eleven
The “O RLY” owls were counted as just another image macro that came from written leetspeak. I suppose I could throw them in there for special recognition (after all, they were quite the rage for a while), but there are so many popular macros I think it would end up making the article 1,000 words longer. Perhaps… Perhaps…
[...] article is here. Posted by Jay Filed in Humor, Life in all its rich [...]
Love it!
Anyone remember when we still spelled 1337 as “elite”?
I’m a geek, and I am old.
I’m ok with that.
oh. is that wut it meens? ai didnt noe.
I’m in your faculties, baffling your theories!
AllBagel — I remember when “Elite” was a wireframe space game. I kicked (iron) @$$ at Elite on an Apple ][+. It’s even older than that, though; the Apple version was a port.
Fantabulous, but there ins’t enough PWNED ones!
Since when are acronyms called “macros”? I mean, WTFBBQ?
And since when is using AFAIK and IANAL l33t5p34k? l4m0r.
Are you even on the same interwebs I am? I mean, rilly.
Since when are acronyms called “macros”? I mean, WTFBBQ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro
Essentially, it’s a concept from Computer Science that’s similar in some ways to an abbreviation or acronym. So on a BBS or forum they could set up a macro to italicize text that’s *like this* or underline text that’s _like this_. Image macros originated as bits of text that would be replaced by an image.
That cat looks like it should eat geckos, not newklear…
[...] Lolcats are great. Here’s mine. [...]
OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOGOM
harted this, grate!!!!11!
AND…All your books are belong to us…lolbrarians.
You forgot: CAN IT BE… NOW
[...] 1337 K4tz0rz 3xp14in3d: more detail about Leetspeak and image macros than you’ll ever need. [...]
[...] you like weird/funny internet history then you should check this article about internet jargon and funny pictures out. If you don’t know much about crazy internet memes then watch out — you have lots [...]
So because people can’t/don’t/are too lazy to proof read “owned” becomes “pwnd”, because the results of frenzied incorrect typing are emotive (”whoever typed this MUST be crazy mad”), we have an emerging lexicon? There will always be leettypes/leetspeaks in all languages; this one just happens to be in Cyberspace (like the Internet, not a real place, but capitalized). Good thing David wrote his say in good olde fashioned English for people like me. It is fascinating, and an explanation of a qualitative analog to Prof. E. Tufte’s great books on visual displays of quantitative information (although he might consider them not more than a glorified PowerPoint presentation format; who knows).
impressive.
Having followed icanhascheezburger for quite some time now, I really enjoyed your breakdown of the leetspeak used in the images of the lolcats, etc. You’ve really started a new leetspeek subgenre in a big way, and its emulation on other sites only confirms its overnight popularity.
It really makes one wonder what sort of slang we’ll be using online and in real life ten years down the road.
Any thoughts on the matter?
Thanks for posting this. I have been trying to make this point about language evolving into a multimedia format with word, images and potentially sound for ages but everyone thinks it is heresy. Glad to see it is becoming a reality.
Loving the Lal image.
Good article! Enjoyed reading it.
[...] Read this amazing rhetorical analysis of language and Internet pictures/comics. I was thinking last night [...]
I think the language will splinter and become even more specialized. The newbies are more interested in entertainment and video than in forums, chats, IRC and so on. Plus, other countries are expanding their presence by leaps and bounds. So, five years from now there will be far more versions (regional accents) of leetspeak than now.
Also, this world is populated mostly by the affluent, but more and more people who used to be unable to waste all day arguing about meaningless pop culture are trickling in. When all cell-phones have good web browsers, the whole community will be changed because so many people who used to have little to do with the Internet will now have access to it on a deeper level.
I foresee a day, maybe 30 years from now, when spoken slang becomes thick with previously text-only leetspeak. The days of the Cyberpunk are coming. When everyone becomes savvy to the ways of the 1337, the 1337 must move farther into the fringes to remain subversive.
Congratulations — you’ve been discovered by the wonderful Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004485.html
The picture of Lal is made of win (has that phrase been studied yet?).
[...] L337 Katz0rz: A Linguistic Approach I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? » Blog Archive A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney – L337 Katz… [...]
You’ve misattributed some stuff in your chart – lolcats followed “im in ur” and “harbl”, “harbl” being a term invented in the /b/ imageboard on the site 4chan.org, and “im in ur” coming from the game Starcraft, if I remember correctly. lolcats adopted those, and lolcats are really nothing more than image macros that have hit a bigger audience (largely because the vast majority of image macros are pretty offensive).
[...] up on yesterday’s BB post about David McRaney’s sociological analysis of LOLcats, image macros, and invisible cheezborgahs, Internet knowitall Simon Spero says: [...]
[...] a macska s mit csinál éppen. Mostanra már ugyanezt megcsinálták geek hősökkel is, készült hűdetudományos elemzése a jelenségnek, szőrszálhasogató szemantikai elemzés, meg persze millióegy variációja a [...]
I was talking about this with my (teen) kids and was startled to discover that “powned” has entered the vernacular as a replacement for “gotcha”. They didn’t even realize the origin. They just use it when someone manages to one-up someone else, either verbally or in a practical joke.
nukelar cat has braynz and much nolij
Pwned is from a type in Warcraft 2, and is not a player typo.
im in ur english, changin your vernacular
GENUIZ!
[...] LOLCats May 20th, 2007 Apparently, this page goes some way to explaining “i can has cheezburger” (one of WordPress’s top blogs) I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? » Blog Archive A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney – L337 Katz0rz … [...]
Missing option: slashdot memes that enter popular non-slashdot culture (eg the “missing option”, “In Soviet Russia, (noun) (verb)S YOU!”, etc)
[...] I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? » Blog Archive A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney – L337 Katz0rz … A history and taxonomy of cat and other macros. (tags: article cats culture humour linguistics sociology interesting meme history lolcats psychology) [...]
Another missing subgenre (and my favourite): DO NOT WANT.
Excellent article though.
I agree 100%
I honestly never really looked at lolcats and leetspeak in a positive sociological light before. I mean, I use bits them both regularly, and I (try to) keep up with the changes and fluctuation, but I thought they were more of a negative influence in general than progress. I figured the assimilation of slang such as pwnt was no different than the assimilation of considerably older slang such as “groovy” or “hang ten”, but I am still not sure whether the decay of written grammar is a positive thing. Its one thing in casual communication, but what will the effects be on a larger scale… or will there be any effects at all?
[...] example and many others are part of a brilliant article written by David McRaney and submitted to I CAN HAS [...]
[...] A Special In-Depth Analysis by David McRaney – L337 Katz0rz [...]
Is that cat with two faces real? O_O
Your article was a very interesting read. i have done a little sociological/linguistic study and I was quite fascinated with your pseudo-sociological explanation of the lolcat phenomenon. Well done.
o mah…..
so thinking mcuh
hrtz mah bukkit
It is our theory that it came about because of Mofaha and his cats, which are a fair bit older than before the LolCat stuff began circulating.
http://www.mofaha.com/b3ta_fps_gallery.asp?imgNum=1
http://www.mofaha.com/b3ta_fps_gallery.asp?imgNum=2
http://www.mofaha.com/topkittins1.asp
Hay meester!
Yer poast.. i liek.
MOAR!
A lot of our kitteh syntax also comes from videogame text badly translated into English. Since I belong to an online community of (deep breath) fans of video game music who also love cats to distraction and are not unacquainted with films, television, computer code, etc., it all makes way too much sense to me.
As the extinction process marches merrily on leaving nothing living in its wake, so goes the human mind. Understand that I like ICHC, but it is just another testament to the dumbing down of humanity. I guess devolving is better endured when we are just too stupid to realize our painful fate. Having a literacy of drunkenness makes our self destruction less realized, letting those who are consumed remain unaware, considering their predicament to be more random than a true destiny. No one will survive, so it is best to be extinguished, if at all possible, while possessing little light.
wy duz i suspek dat ur 1 vowt ov 5 burgs wuz self-awardid?
hmmmms…
teho, ur rite, i fink.
germinate sound like da wun gai waitin 4 everbuddy to die an he wantz to watches it happen cause he hate everbuddy so murtch… pritty sad…
mebbe we hasnt found da cure 4 mortiliteh. we all cross da bridj. butt we duznt has 2 b miserabel wile we down heer!!!
hug for teho {{hug}}
hug for germinate {{hug}}
As a 48 year old English lit major who happened to become enamoured of World of Warcraft, I’ve had to learn a whole new language. I was greeted by someone I knew in-game recently with ‘Hai! Bai mai goldz’. This is a macro joke, poking fun at several levels. ‘hai, bai, mai’ is a poke at oriental ‘gold farmers’ who come on the game for brief instances (so they dont get caught by game developers) to try to sell you virtual game money, and the ‘goldz’ is leetspeak evolved into kitteh. It’s a multi-layered wrap-around joke that I have to appreciate, poking fun, all at once, at online friendships we develop during gaming, the sales people who come into the game that we make fun of, how ‘leet’ we are, and the cuteness of lolcats whose pictures are worth a thousand wordz. The salutation was from a 14 year old on my gaming team who knows I’m 48, (we have ages 10-74 on our gaming team) and he is saying in 4 words, that even across such age lines, he finds we have common ground.
Text messaging on cellphones also contributes heavily to leetspeak, with its ‘hw r u?’ and ‘wht u doing?’ ; abbreviated to save both tiny multiple keystrokes on a number pad, time and possible fees. Txt messaging then influences instant chat programs like Aim and Yahoo messenger so that people are typing on fullsize keyboards the same way. And add to that, ventrilo and teamspeak, ‘voice over IP applications’ used for gaming where microsoft sam (computerized voice of those applications) actually pronounces lol as ‘lawl’, thus bringing in another influence, so that when talking over these gaming voice applications, leetspeak has a basis for pronuniciations.
I figure that I’m going to be ahead communicating with my grandson, who is now 6 years old. Nobody writes like Chaucer today, and we’re not going to be writing like Melville tomorrow, that’s apparent.
ferzackerly whut i wuz finkin….
nobuddy rites like chauser cause dat wuz a long time agoes. in fifty yeers, nobuddy gonna rite like dis. will bee diffrent. life marches on an as it marches, it changes. uvverwise, no prgress.
I really found this article intriguing as one of my interests is the evolution of languages. In fact, I actually used a “kitteh” dialect mixed with a “mountain man” dialect to create a new dialect for a character in a story that I’m working on. Also, as a Caturday/Lolcat fan, I catch myself saying things like, “i has a free refihl!” or, “NOOO!! thay be steelin mah krahnz!” in actual conversation.
Geemister,u rite smart! How duz yer fine xpozishun ufkect Schroedinger’s LOLcat?
In other words, will analysis substantially affect development of language structure in Internet slanguage; will language spread be limited by speed of evolution (outlying areas learning it at the same time initiating areas have evolved to unrecognizable forms), and what hope have older lifeforms in bridgeing the communication (and spelling) gap?
CS
Iz unnerstandin lolcats riet wai!
‘Way back in the early daze be4 we new dis as Internet, Talking Cats wuz a feacher of the PETS forum in CompUServe. My deer laet huzbend n I akshully led live chats wher Everbuddy meowed like dis!
Dis site rox@!
hey very interesting artickle… def does tickle the brainacular (wordz in mai ed)!
mx
Ow, chart gib me hedesk
1. Which came first, ICHC or LOLCATS?
2. Am I the only one who thinks “toddler-speak” when reading ICHC?
1. lolcats
2. yes
ennyfing else?
1. lolkittehs
2. probably yes. I think it’s interesting to read ICHC. A new language is being created. Really.
huytar
lopmner
posreni
Bue!
Hai! I noe it now…
It might interest you to know that in the mid 1990s, before we had heard of leet or lolcats (in the days when acronyms were no longer usually three letters but still tended to be called TLAs), many of our dogs were holding conversations on the usenet newsgroup rec.pets.dogs.misc. These were called ‘woofchat’ and the early postings can still be found on good news archives such as the Google newsgroup archive. Thousands of these postings were made over many years.
Woofspeak was typified by mangled doggy grammar and spelling (hard to type with paws), and the postings were usually given a subject heading that was prefixed with ‘woof’ (or less commonly ‘woofchat’), making them easy to search out even now. Dogs seemed rather more enthusiastic about everything than cats appear to be, with the exception of “poly ticks” and being called a “baddog”, and were generally tolerant of their “hoomins” even if they didn’t understand us much.
I haven’t read woof in years, and those of my dogs that participated are no longer living, however to this day their email addresses still receive spam. Personally, I always felt it was a little cruel of spammers to send spam about enlarging the male anatomy to a dog that was missing his bits!
My dog was an active woofer “back in the day” and I as much as I love lolcats I will never forget, and still miss, woofchat!
i arrr encandled
This is a great article. It got me thinking about chatspeak–the act of shortening words to chat faster (e.g. “You are really funny” turns into “u make me lol”). This is different from leetspeak, which actually makes words longer. This article reminded me a lot of newspeak from 1984. In that book, there is a language created to strip off unnecessary words, “designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought” by making a “verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables”. Similarly, image macros and acronyms pack a whole range of inside jokes into one image that everyone will understand. Instead of taking the time to read an entire sentence, you see an image and understand instantly–then move on. There is no time to think about what you are seeing.
Internetspeak (my term for chatspeak/leetspeak/macros, etc.) is not a bad thing right now, because it is expressed by people who can read and write English perfectly. It’s just a big fun inside joke that I myself enjoy, and that expands every day to include more cultures and meanings. The problem, and what really gets me worried, is that generations from now, internetspeak will become so ubiquitous that people start _thinking_ in it. Already, I often skim around long paragraphs or think “tl;dr” when I’m reading on the internet, and I avoid chatspeak like the plague. Since most modern Americans read things on the internet fifteen times more than they read things at the library, young kids are exposed to a lot more chatspeak than full English sentences. Right now leetspeak is written by people who are intelligent and can write in proper English, but choose not to. Eventually, that might not be the case. If Americans don’t read more, than internetspeak may become the common parlance.
Of course, I’m *not* suggesting that leetspeak is just like newspeak. Newspeak is a way to enforce totalitarian thinking, and leetspeak is a way to enforce inside jokes about cats in unusual and amusing positions. Also, newspeak limits the number of words, while leetspeak vocabulary grows by leaps and bounds (think of how invisible ___ lead to visible ___) and encourages imaginative spelling. I’m just saying that that both ’speaks have something in common, and that if reading internetspeak replaces reading full English, then people won’t be able to express themselves in full sentences that require long periods of sustained thought. Once you can’t express something, it becomes much, much harder to think it.
133tspeak and macros remind me of the “rules” of Cockney rhyming slang. U L00k it up if u want; keeps me posts short.
BTW, 1984 = g00d book, short title.
w00t! me brain just b0rked!
who actually read all that and understood every single paragraph? Honestly??
in general, thats pretty damn interesting, but confusing at times :S
The fun thing is that lol is actually a word and means fun (in NL language) …
Very nice article. I agree/likes.
wow, i’d say they nailed it right on it’s head. however, i’d say it has almost developed into it’s own language. There’s more difference between it and modern english than medieval english and german (its origin).
Brilliant article! Very interesting!
As one myself, I can safely say Furries are mostly harmless.
And for the next twist in the LOL tail
http://lolcode.com
The programming language in LOLCATZ
The famous “Hello World” Program
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYE
ttttrrrribbblessss!
I be luving them
thanks a lot..
Ai studdeez teh Welcsh an ai sez pwned leik puuuuuned!!
mebbe iz teh rong butt ai leiks anyways
(Cumree am bithh!!)
That’s brilliant! Thanks for posting!
Hai! I noe it now…
tl;dr
//At its most basic, leetspeak is pure written language slang originally used to get ideas across faster than spelling out commonly used terms like, “away from keyboard,” which became AFK. Over time, usage of the acronym allowed for descriptive expressions like “He’s gone AFK.”//
someone also said something along the lines of “in the 90’s, before we had leetspeek”
i am surprised nobody has pointed out this blatant misconception yet O.o maybe should spend more time at lolgeeks.com
i guess the mid 90s, the time when AOL began to rise into power on the internet, would be the time when the average joe would have access to internet slang concepts. i remember my family’s computer having a flip-page thing stuck to the side of it with a list of internet abbreviations such as “LOL” “BRB” “TTYL” etc.
1337 has been around since the mid 80’s, however, when people would misspell things over bbs using ascii characters as replacement. this would put them “in tune” with the “computer geek” subculture, and prove that they were PRETTY GOOD WITH COMPUTAZ and could feel cool about themselves for their secret society <3. tbh “lol” is not leetspeak, neither is “afk” “bbl” “brb” or any of the many other popular abbreviations and acronyms.
if you read Wikipedia and use that as your only basis of knowledge, you will see that open-source users group stuff like “lol” in with the evolution of leetspeak. now that the borders are merging in the 2k’s, we get things like w00t being added to webster’s dictionary and lulz on the news.
31337 h4×0rz, and regular users, now blend 1337 with other varieties of internet slang, for an awesome flavor of internet subculture that anybody can try to replicate, but few, imho, can ever actually be good at.
you fialed to point out that half the lol in lolcat speak is seeing a few words in a whole sentence misspelled. not the whole sentence. that just maeks you look like a noob who (after all these years!) no longer has to disguise the fact that you are totally illiterate.
in a similar group, also forgotten to mention in this article, are false tags and commands like /headdesk and wow it was so inclusive of all the internet subcultures, and clearly shows how everything is going to merge into one
7|-|4|\||<5 |=012 4 (00|_ 41271(|_3 4|\|¥\|/4′/!1!111one
Am i the only one who noticed that 13375p33k =/= lolspeak
13375p33k = (4|\| 1 |-|4\/3 4 (|-|3353|.(_)|?&3|? ?
lolspeak = i can has cheezburger?
thank you site admin.
IcanhazINVISIBLEcheezBURGER!!!!!!11
David McRaney are full of win!!
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David McRaney are full of win!!