LOL Word Meaning
Want the official definition of “LOL”? The Oxford English Dictionary has you covered. This BBC article dives into the origins and usage of this most iconic nugget of Internet slang.
You Can Has LOL Cats?
All photos: icanhascheezburger.com
If you can make any sense of the title you can skip this post, if not, read on. Welcome to the quirky, cute and often hilarious world of lolcats. The idea behind lolcats (“lol”=”laugh out loud” + “cats”) is simple enough, take a photo of a cat, slap a caption with poor spelling and grammar on it and voilà, you get anthropomorphic humor for the Internet generation. Pictured above, the ultra popular lolcat that sparked the creation of the official I Can Has Cheezburger? site and spawned a bevy of sites featuring not only felines but all sorts of animals.
An excerpt from an article in Time:
It’s easier to show lolcats than to explain it. The oldest known example—which probably dates to 2006—is an image of a chubby gray kitty looking at the camera and asking plaintively, I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? Later came a shot of a kitten in a state of feline outrage, standing over a plate of what look like clementines and meowing DO NOT WANT. A ginger cat caught in midleap, hind legs pedaling furiously, appears over the words INVISIBLE BIKE. A fierce-looking tabby crouches in a well-stocked refrigerator: IM IN UR FRIDGE EATIN UR FOODZ. You get the idea. These home-made cartoons seem to lift the veil on a truth that we all quietly suspected anyway: cats are small, childish, sentient beings, mischievous and innocent at the same time.
Lolcats has a mindless, goofy quality that’s deceptively simple. Every one of the examples cited above is part of a dense web of reference and
self-reference that only people who spend way too much time online can
fully appreciate. The IM IN UR FRIDGE lolcat, for example, is a nod to
a screen shot from a video game, much circulated on the Web for its
brainless quirkiness, in which one player says to another, I’M IN UR
BASE, KILLING UR DOODS. Part of the lolcats’ appeal lies in the way it
domesticates the wild linguistic frontier of the Internet, rife with
chat abbreviations, hacker acronyms, typos and trans-hemispherical
East-West garblings.
Update (June 5, 2008):
It seems like the obsession with pets as miniature entertainers on the Web just keeps growing, proof of which is the collection of videos related to animals too exhausted to prop themselves up and the inevitable ensuing “oh, that’s so adorable” comments.
