Christianity According to LOLCats

An Internet phenom turns serious when biblical translators take up lolspeak
Ceiling Cat Creates Da Urf: Photo by lolcatbible.com

A couple years ago, a Web sensation was born when a bunch of people started posting photos of cute animals—mostly kittens—doing funny stuff, mostly with computers, and captioning these photos in the weird pidgen of baby talk and IM slang now known as “lolspeak."

Several PopSci editors are certifiably obsessed with lolspeak fansites icanhasacheezburger and lolcat.com, which are admittedly funniest if you happen to be fond of the following things: 1) the Internet, 2) kittens and 3) weird grammar. If you’re itching to become fluent in lolspeak, icanhasacheezburger has a grammar guide that will bring you up to speed in no time. Once you’re proficient, you’ll no doubt want to assist in the effort to translate the Bible into lolspeak. Important rule of thumb: Remember that “God” is translated as “Ceiling Cat,” as in this passage from Genesis 1:1: “In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.”

If translating religious texts is not your thing but you’ve got a technical bent, perhaps you’ll be more interested in joining in the development of the new programming language LOLCODE, based on lolspeak. You know, because every bit of help counts. This is important work, people.

8 Comments

Comments

Dillon-ODell
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So according to this, if I want to 'lolspeak' I haves 2 talk liked me iz dum?

3 out of 7 people found this comment helpful
MRC
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I hardly call this entertaining. The fact that you are promoting this drivel as entertainment shows your contempt for something you have never seriously tried to understand. Is this what science has come to?

0 out of 6 people found this comment helpful
lolcatter
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I've been looking at lolcats for several months, and it's amazing to watch the language evolve. Technically, I think this is what linguists call a pidgin. It appears to have different grammatical rules than regular English and its derived from elements of 733t, common Internet misspellings and text messaging abbreviations.

I've tried writing and I've been corrected by other users in my incorrect usage of lolspeak grammar.

7 out of 8 people found this comment helpful
Milkweed110
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I'za da no be likng LOLcatspeek.

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Zotnix
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I always get that weird sense of excitement when my site gets mentioned on a big website. When I started it back in July of last year I didn't expect it to get as popular as it did.

Thanks for the shout out though.

As per above, there is some talk that lolcat is a pidgin and I think there have been some papers done regarding lolcat bible and the possibility of better understanding the lolcat language through it.

We are still not quite done yet and I am pushing to eventually get at least some of the Bible published. Maybe a lolcat biblical story book.

4 out of 4 people found this comment helpful
Andree
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Great article and great comments. I would like to point your readers to the weekly lectionary readings for cats at my blog (yes, shameless promotion). So that "kitteh can has reelijin", we publish this weekly for all families to study together.

http://meeyauw.blogspot.com/search/label/lolcat

Thank you!

_/\_/\_

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Bluelaser
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And i thought this would be some stupid article about religous people mad about the bible (Wrong again).-Word.of.Warcraft

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ohnonsense
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Some of the comments above illustrate what I think is one of the most interesting aspects of the LOLspeak phenomenon: The genre has become so self-referential that a newcomer has an awful lot of reading to do before he or she can get in on the jokes.

The one lolcatbible verse quoted in the article, for example, calls upon not just an understanding of the distinctive grammar and spelling but also (1) the "ceiling cat" image macros, (2) that "ceiling cat" has come to stand for God, and (3) the "I maded u a cookie but I eated it" image macro and the snowclone it begot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone).

Other spinoffs are the same way: LOLCODE syntax is packed with references to particular pictures among the many, many thousands that have been produced. Sites like lolpresident.com and lolcops.com assume from their earliest posts that visitors are already familiar with the deep archives of the sites that came before them.

It's fascinating, then, that in spite of these barriers to newcomers, the audience for lolspeak humor has growth at the pace and to the scale that is has.

0 out of 0 people found this comment helpful

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