Do you speak Kitteh?
By RAQUEL MARIA DILLON for ASAP (AP’s now defunct multimedia service)
LOS ANGELES (AP) _It looks like the inspirational posters found in a guidance counselor’s office — a Siamese kitten playing with balls of colorful yarn. Then there’s the caption: “I’m in ur fizx lab, testn ur string therry.”
Lolcats — deceptively simple photos of cats with absurd captions — are cute and fluffy. And that’s all they’d be, if they didn’t talk so funny.
The captions adhere to a strict grammar of “kitty pidgin,” an amalgam of texting acronyms, poorly translated movie subtitles and leet speak, or hacker lingo. Proper lolcat features consistent misspellingz, subjects and verbs that disagrees and lotsa typos.
The “meme,” or an idea that propagates through culture, is so popular that the exhaustive lolcats library gets almost 200,000 unique visitors per month.