Lolcat

A lolcat (pronounced ), or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images' idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak.

Lolcat is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation LOL (laugh out loud) and the word "cat". A synonym for lolcat is cat macro or cat meme, since the images are a type of image macro and also a well-known genre of meme. Lolcats are commonly designed for photo sharing imageboards and other Internet forums.

History

British portrait photographer Harry Pointer created a carte de visite series featuring cats posed in various situations in the early 1870s. To these he usually added amusing text intended to further enhance their appeal. Other notable early figures include Harry Whittier Frees and (using mounted animals) Walter Potter.

The first recorded use of the term "lolcat" was used on 4chan, an anonymous imageboard. The word "Lolcat" was in use as early as June 2006; the domain name lolcats.com was registered on June 14, 2006. Their popularity was spread through usage on forums such as Something Awful. ''The News Journal'' states that "some trace the lolcats back to the site 4chan, which features bizarre cat pictures on Saturdays, or 'Caturdays'." Ikenburg adds that the images have been "slinking around the Internet for years under various labels, but they did not become a sensation until early 2007 with the advent of I Can Has Cheezburger?" The first image on "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?" was posted on January 11, 2007, and was allegedly from the Something Awful website." Lev Grossman of ''Time'' wrote that the oldest known example "probably dates to 2006", but later corrected himself in a blog post where he recanted his statement based on the anecdotal evidence readers had sent him, placing the origin of "Caturday" and many of the images now known by a few as "lolcats" in early 2005. The domain name "caturday.com" was registered on April 30, 2005.

The term ''lolcat'' gained national media attention in the United States when it was covered by ''Time'', which wrote that non-commercialized phenomena of the sort are increasingly rare, stating that lolcats have "a distinctly old-school, early 1990s, Usenet feel to hem. Partial scan of the print edition
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''Entertainment Weekly'' put them on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Da cutest distractshun of da decaid? Y, lolcats of corse! We can neber haz enuf of deez capshioned pics of cuddlie kittehs." "Lolcat" was also a runner-up under the "Most Creative" category under the American Dialect Society Word of the Year Awards, losing out to
"Googlegänger".

In December 2014, the word ''lolcat'' entered the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', appearing in its online version.

Format

Lolcat is a compound word made from "lol" and "cat". " Lol" stands for "Laugh out Loud" or "Laughing out Loud"; hence, lolcats are intended to be funny and to include jokes. Lolcats images comprise a photo of a cat with a large caption characteristically set in a heavy sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black. The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect.

The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and grammar, featuring "conjugated verbs, but a tendency to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar".

The text parodies the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to Internet slang. Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of phrasal templates. Some phrases have a known source, usually a well-known Internet meme, such as All your base are belong to us or Do not want, while others don't. The language of lolcats has also been likened to baby talk, however it draws on a variety of linguistic resources, not just the imitation of baby talk.

Common themes include jokes of the form "Im in ur oun erbing ur elated noun" Many lolcat images capture cats performing characteristically human actions or appearing to use modern technology, such as computers.

There are several well-known LOLcat images and single-word captions that have spawned many variations and imitations, including "Ceiling Cat" (see below). Others include Fail (a cat with a slice of processed cheese on its face) and " I Can Has Cheezburger" (a portrait of a blue British Shorthair). Another popular format is " djectivecat is djective/noun"

Recurring characters

"Ceiling Cat" is a character spawned by the meme. The original image was an image macro with a picture of a cat looking out of a hole in a ceiling, captioned "Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate." There followed numerous examples with the format "Ceiling Cat is watching you 'verb'' ending in / rhyming with -ate with Ceiling Cat superimposed in the upper left hand corner of an image macro depicting the appropriate action. The underlying theme is that the cat is looking down on one, almost in a form of judgment. "Ceiling Cat" and the corresponding "Basement Cat" (a black cat who lives in the basement) represent good and evil in the lolcat universe, and in some cases God and Satan, as in the LOLCat Bible Translation Project. ''Ceiling Cat'' by Eva & Franco Mattes, a 2016 taxidermy cat installation mimicking the meme, is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Offshoots and parodies

Variations on the lolcat concept include captioning photos of other animals in a similar style (e.g. ''loldogs'' for dogs, etc.).

The syntax of lolcat captions was used as the basis for LOLCODE, an esoteric programming language with interpreters and compilers available in .NET Framework, Perl, etc.

In the Java edition of the video game Minecraft, there is an option to change language settings to LOLCAT.

Another example is Polandball, which uses broken English, reminiscent of the lolcat meme.

lolcat, a variant of the Unix utility cat, outputs text in rainbow colours.

See also

* List of Internet phenomena
* Cats That Look Like Hitler – a type of LOLcat specifically made to look like Adolf Hitler
* Cute cat theory of digital activism – using lowbrow but popular online subjects for activism
* Catvertising – cats in advertising, especially the parody of commercialization of cat viral videos by ''st. john''
* Doge (meme) – an Internet meme featuring a shiba inu, with slang similar in format to lolspeak
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* Grumpy Cat – an Internet celebrity cat who was known for her grumpy facial expression
* I Can Has Cheezburger? – a weblog featuring lolcats
* O RLY? – a related meme featuring image macros, usually of a snowy owl
* Oolong (rabbit) – a bunny trained to balance objects on its head. Famous for balancing pancakes and waffles, it has become a meme similar to lolcats.
* Laugh-Out-Loud Cats – a comic inspired by lolspeak and other Internet humor
* LOLCat Bible Translation Project – bible translation project to lolspeak
* LOLCODE – an esoteric programming language inspired by lolspeak
* Padonki – a Russian Internet subculture, with slang similar in format to lolspeak

Notes

References

With 'LOLcats' Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke
''The Wall Street Journal'', August 25, 2007

If you give a cat a keyboard
''Minneapolis Star Tribune'', July 26, 2007

Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks
''BusinessWeek'', July 13, 2007
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External links

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{{Internet slang

Cats in popular culture
Animals on the Internet
Internet slang
Internet humor
Photography by genre
4chan phenomena
Internet memes introduced in 2006
2006 neologisms

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