Written in April 2009, for Professor Daniel Tiffany’s Comparative Literature 471 seminar entitled “Literature, Theory, History.” I tried to adapt the paper for the Internet, so I divided it up into sections with new section titles that weren’t there when I handed the paper in to Prof. Tiffany.
A Lyrically Strange New Vernacular
O hai, has u seen teh pix of kittehs wit teh lolspeak? Those combinations of cute, captioned cat images are known as lolcats, and the poor grammar associated with them – a feline study in ESL – is called lolspeak. In one well-known example, a chubby gray cat tilts its head and plaintively meows “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” (Newitz, 2007). By now both the lolcat phenomenon and its kitty pidgin have permeated the Internet and in 2007 the meme spilled beyond the data pipes and into major papers and periodicals like TIME Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. That year each publication hastened to put forth articles on this lingual Web subculture that seemed to have spontaneously proliferated through chatrooms, forums and webpages. Perhaps they intuited that they were handling the vernacular speech of the Internet, with the column in TIME calling it a “revolution in user-generated content” (Grossman 2007). This “revolution” owes much to the novel processes involved in the lolcats’ mediation of image and text, but it is the kitty vernacular in its explicitly textual form that has allowed the craze to flourish: the jargon has now branched beyond cats to loldogs, lolwalruses, lolbunnies, and even lolpresidents. To understand how lolspeak can be identified as a new and infectious iteration of vernacular lyric, it is helpful to compare its similarities in structure and origin to the thieving cant of Elizabethan England. Like cant, lolspeak utilizes an obscure pidgin and has dubious roots in an anonymous underworld, but its presentation of those shared characteristics holds new implications for the status of the vernacular. The act of engaging with lolspeak can be variously and ironically mediated, and this signals a new shift towards Baudrillardian hyperreality for the vernacular’s models of readership and the appropriation of culture in a world dominated by the medium of the Internet.
Criminal Cats
As for the world dominated by Queen Elizabeth I, the thieves’ cant of that time had “the illicit space of the tavern” in which it could be bred (Tiffany 92). The “bowsing ken” gave the otherwise vagrant criminal community a seedy meeting ground where deals could be struck and their “bousy speche” performed, and lent its own topos as a model for “the sociological obscurity of the demimonde” (Farmer 1, 5; Tiffany 92). The 21st century Internet analogue to the tavern where lolspeak originated from was a deceptively modest-looking imageboard forum called 4chan. Set up as an online “image-based bulletin board,” 4chan has one particularly notorious sub-board called /b/ that is the source of most of the Internet’s most infectious memes and inside jokes. In the list of rules that accompany each subforum, the only one under /b/’s is “ZOMG NONE!!!1,” which translates from lolspeak to “Oh my god, none” (4chan.org). The board is resultantly littered with obscenities, offenses and broken taboos, and despite the ban on child pornography, “even this is the subject of jokes” (Landers 2008). Mainstream commentators who have ventured into 4chan report that reading this “asshole of the Internet” will “melt your brain” (Douglas 2008).
4chan’s madness may partially be due to its revered practice of anonymity. Unlike most forums, posters do not have to register a username to contribute. The imageboard automatically labels unregistered posts as having been written by “Anonymous,” and consequently “Anonymous” is credited with almost every post. It is common for even moderators and site administrators to post as anons, and most discussions are long threads where Anonymous answers and converses with itself. Posters play with this concept and acknowledge Anonymous as its own entity, as when one satisfied “anon” wrote of another’s image post “anon delivers” (4chan.org). As this suggests, references to “Anon” blur the line between the individual and the collective, making it a name for a “hive mind of popular opinion” (Landers 2008). This demonstrates the extent to which these internet “vagrants” utilize anonymity in much the same way that the Elizabethan canting crew did, where the anonymous condition was intrinsic to how the figure of the “vagrant poet” modeled cant’s “vibrant historical countertradition” (Tiffany 84). By being the “public mask” of a “private subculture” of thieves and beggars, “anonymous authorship” hid individuals with a collective identity (Reynolds 68).
Membership via Method of Madness
The balance between the anonymity granted by a mass identity and the attention that this “spectacle of privacy” confers to the individual constitutes a paradoxical “open secret,” and establishes what Tiffany describes as an “impossible community” (88). We have seen the contradiction in how anonymous input on 4chan’s public forums make that community an “impossible” one, but its open secret becomes especially resonant “once it becomes recognizably literary in form” – and as the textual derivative of 4chan and Internet culture, lolspeak is itself another “open secret” and one of the Internet’s “most intriguing and attractive features” (Tiffany 88, Reynolds 68). Secrets placed out in the open can only retain their mystery by being shrouded in obscurity, and kitty pidgin is as adept as cant is in using a strange formulation of verbal code to shroud its meaning.
This obscurity makes both cant and lolspeak “sound like gibberish to the outsider” (Tiffany 87). For instance, the lolspeak sentence “dat beesings a kiti vary ful ov tewtul kutenis!!” translates to “that is a cute cat” (speaklolspeak.com). This example “demonstrates the correlation between song and nonsense in cant” and lolspeak, but just as nonsense and cant are highly structured, so too is lolspeak (Tiffany 87). Blogger and cultural commentator Anil Dash notes that examples of incorrectly applied lolspeak exist and are quite easy to spot, and “the fact that we can tell no cat would talk like this shows that kitty pidgin is actually quite consistent” (Dash 2007). This consistency shows in the availability of tutorial websites that teach newcomers how to slang in lolspeak in just five grammar-bending steps (speaklolspeak.com). On top of grammar rules, however, lolspeak has also been constructed by appropriating terms from other, older internet slangs, including instant messaging shorthand and 1337speak.
Like lolspeak, 1337speak originates from a highly exclusive community. Rooted in a hacker culture of cybercops, hacker vigilantes and script kiddie punks, the extent to which that community valued its associated patois is evidenced by its careful custodianship of a compendium called The Jargon File that outlines hacker terminology (Jargon File, Chapter 4). 1337speak is practiced by replacing letters with numbers or symbols, and 1337 is itself a set of numbers meant to look like “leet,” short for “elite” – although the name 1337speak is a misnomer anyway as pure 1337speak could only be in written form. Consequently the sentence “hey noob [a 1337speak term for beginner] this is a really easy sentence can you read it?” might be turned into “l-l3′/ l\l008 +l-l15 15 4 l23/-\11′/ 3/-\5′/ 53l\l+3l\l(3. (/-\l\l ’/0l_l l234l) 1+?!” (1337speak – The Guide, 2007).
This is an extremely rigorous form of 1337speak, however, and more colloquial usages include the terms pwned (derived from a typo of “owned,” meaning to lose drastically), haxxor (hacker), suxxor (sucks), -xor suffixes in general, and noob (beginner). Instant messaging shorthand also consists of symbolic substitutions, though it swaps acronyms for whole phrases rather than individual letters: LOL is short for laugh out loud; ROFL for rolling on floor laughing. But when spoken aloud and then re-transcribed, IM shorthand has different phonetic renderings – lol becomes lawl (either an onomatopoeia or a verb) and lols (plural) become lulz (noun). As its name implies, lolspeak was partially constructed using some of this terminology, and its “impossible community” is also built upon the understanding of these exclusive references to 1337speak and IM shorthand. Gaming culture also figures into these inside jokes – a common construction in lolcat captions that accompany pictures of cats who have wriggled into unlikely places is “im in ur [x], [y]ing ur [z].” This is a reference to one instance in an online game where a player invaded another’s territory with the taunt “im in ur base killin ur d00dz” (Dash 2007).
These references and inside jokes lay the boundaries of lolspeak’s internet subculture between those who get the jokes and those who don’t. With such an exclusive community set apart from those outside it, lolspeak fits the criteria as a vernacular lyric that exists in opposition to mainstream culture. It is perceived disdainfully by the “traditional” literary establishment, with Ivor Tossell of the Globe and Mail calling it a manifestation of “everything wrong with” the “online underclass” and linguist Geoffrey Pullum of the University of Edinburgh representing the opinion of many academic critics in calling lolspeak’s effect on language “utterly trivial” (Tossell 2007, Pullum 2003). It is also rife with the eclecticism characteristic of most vernaculars: if the previous examples weren’t enough, one popular lolspeak greeting from 4chan is “I herd u like mudkipz,” referencing a Pokemon game character. But as Tiffany reminds us, cant’s “history of thievery” is one where the vernacular subversively appropriates from the mainstream and the mainstream commodifies the vernacular (83). If the mudkipz phrase borrows from gamer culture with liberal 1337speak misspellings and characteristic 4chan aggression, is it really appropriating elements of the mainstream or is it cannibalizing other vernaculars? Nick Douglas of Gawker.com suggests that “the LOLspeak you now think is so clever” is actually a “degeneration” from 4chan’s “forumspeak” (Douglas 2008). Douglas’s suggestion would indicate a failure of the old model for perceiving the vernacular, as we are now presented with a series of ironic appropriations from one vernacular to another. This threatens the definitive boundaries framing lolspeak, and implies that it is instead a decadent form of a different vernacular.
Lolspeak as a Mirror to Re-examine the Vernacular
It is useful here to refer to Schiller’s definitions of the poetry as mediated through naïve and sentimental perceptions. In his essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” Schiller maintains that a “naïve” approach is held by a poet who is himself “nature” (that is, he is set within the context he writes about) while poets utilizing a sentimental methodology must instead “seek” out their object. In other words, the sentimental is that artifact appropriated from outside its natural context. The implications for the vernacular are clear: if we keep appropriating vernaculars from other vernaculars, then the concept of the vernacular has itself become sentimental. This sort of “nostalgia” is the focus of Baudrillard’s writing, who asserts that appropriation in the age of simulation and simulacra (which the Internet embodies) is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” where everything is an image of a previous image, leading to a “desert of the real.”
But this is not to say that a sentimental vernacular has no legitimate mechanism of interaction. Although most casual observers of lolspeak are at least vaguely aware that they are looking at “a dense web of reference and self-reference that only people who spend way too much time online can fully appreciate,” most are still able to superficially enjoy the experience as a playfully absurd one (Grossman 2007). David McRaney says that it “doesn’t matter” if an observer doesn’t “really get” all the subtexts because “‘Im in ur fridge eatin your foodz’ is funny to everyone, even if you don’t get the reference” (Rutkoff 2007). Epitomizing this democratic absurdity are community projects to translate T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Homer’s Odyssey, and the Bible into lolspeak, which has already turned the first line of Genesis into “Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem” (www.lolcatbible.com). These could be underhanded vernacular attacks on the established literary canon, but if so, the effort still winds up reveling in language’s potential for absurdity.
Examining once again lolspeak’s most common terms suggests a relation between this absurdity and deliberately regressive, juvenile tendencies: the onomatopoeic phrase signaling the act of eating is “NOM NOM NOM,” where the repetition suggests a playful toying with syllables much like a young toddler would do. A similarly regressive attitude can be found in phrases like “d00dz” where it seems that every grown-up convention of grammar is deliberately flouted – superfluously replacing the letter s with z, giving o’s a wide-eyed look with the typographic zero character as a replacement, and substituting the long o sound for the short u sound are all instances where the “wrong” grammatical and spelling choice is intentionally selected. But such careful attention to always being incorrect betrays a conscious awareness of such a binary and of what the proper selection ought to be. Lolspeak’s absurdity is therefore not genuinely regressive, but instead ironically mediated.
A New Mediation by Irony: Go Figure, Of Course It Would Be That Shit Again
As a new model for appraising the vernacular of lolspeak, irony works very well. It reinstates those lolspeak “attacks” on the literary canon as truly absurdist enterprises, since the phrase “april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has” becomes less about reducing Eliot’s line “April is the cruelest month” and more about recognizing it in both its original literary form and its freely derivative lolspeak incarnation (Reed 2007). The phrase “ZOMG” is so absurdly entertaining because we are ironically aware of the promiscuity of the lolspeak z – so long as we are placing it in places it shouldn’t be, why not at the beginnings of words too? Oh my god we are so daring ZOMG! – and so it goes. Even the mediation of text and image in a lolcat picture owes its mirth-generating qualities to an appreciation of the ironic visual pun between the cat licking its own paw and the caption “I HAS A FLAVOR.” However, this explanation paints irony as a type of meta-appreciation of all possible interactions one could have with lolspeak, including mediations both literary and vernacular. But an explanation more specific to the vernacular can still arise from this context: irony forgives and allows for new vernacular interactions.
For instance, if a newcomer to lolspeak has just stumbled into 4chan, he or she may be ironically aware that this is the realm of the stupid and multiply generative Internet, yet allow him or herself to regress and interact with such a medium according to its own rules. Irony in this fashion mediates an excuse for the general population to freely enjoy the vernacular of lolspeak. Even the articles of the mainstream press covering lolspeak seem to utilize this sort of pardonable irony to try (too hard, sometimes) to explain lolspeak by adopting elements of its patois (Cridlin 2007). With weight of a seemingly omnipotent body of knowledge that can hold a multiplicity of conflicting binaries like the literary and vernacular next to each other, it seems that ironic mediation is the Internet’s only possible mode of operation.
Lolspeak owes its very proliferation to this type of ironic interaction, as the viral mutations from one inside joke to another rely upon an awareness of the original context so as to appreciate how the new joke plays off of it. The “im in ur [x], [y]ing ur [z]” construction, for instance, initially referred to virtual military bases but before long an “IM IN UR FRIDGE EATIN UR FOODZ” variant arose that gave way to an office environment and even later to a joke about Schrodinger’s cat (Rutkoff 2007). Lolspeak even makes ironic fun of its own irony. The existence of LOLCODE, an esoteric programming language that uses lolspeak terms to form computer programming code, responds to questions about lolspeak’s codified cant and whether its ironic jokes are consistent enough to serve as logic functions (The O HAI command opens programs and KTHXBAI signals termination). However, the entire concept of deriving a code from a kitty pidgin that is itself intrinsically derivative is ironic and answers the question “can this be accomplished” with yet more questions about appropriation. It is this slippery evasion that gives lolspeak its most rigorous vernacular defense against traditional academic cognition and commercial appropriation.
This Vernacular and the Mainstream
This always evolving, amorphous quality makes it difficult to ascertain exactly what community lolspeak represents and for what purpose it is used, but that is again exactly the point. Lolspeak can be perceived as a lingual model that cognitively maps the mass, anonymous Internet, whose embrace of anonymity has reached such cultish heights as to have spawned a headless, anarchic activist campaign against the Church of Scientology with a YouTube video that proclaimed “We are Anonymous. We are legion” (Landers 2008). The 4chan FAQ definition of Anonymous describes it as “not a single person, but rather, represents the collective whole. He is a god amongst men” and goes on to also claim that “Anonymous invented the moon, assassinated former President David Palmer, is harder than the hardest metal known to man,” and “currently resides with his auntie and uncle in a town called Bel-Air (however, he is West Philadelphia born and raised” (4chan.org). In other words, lolspeak and its shifting facelessness epitomize the possibilities of multiplicity, and every instance where lolspeak is used constitutes a speech act of tapping into this vast placeless potential where individual identities are traded for the safety and power of the multitude.
This is also a relative safety from the mainstream and its attempts to commercialize lolspeak, in that it presents capitalist culture theft a new unique challenge given the built-in intertextuality of the vernacular and the slippery irony that mediates it. The traditional modes of mainstream appropriation do not work as well – 4chan has great difficulty finding sponsorship even when it wants to, as most enterprises want to stay away from associating with the raunchy and offensive /b/. But the mainstream is quickly finding new ways to overcome this resiliency. A Cingular phone commercial features an argument between a mother and her daughter over a phone bill, with subtitles for the daughter’s spoken lolspeak shorthand answers to her mother and her mother responding in standard English. It is obviously not authentic lolspeak cant; the daughter’s outraged cry of “TISNF,” for instance, has never been an accepted acronym for “this is so not fair” (Cingular). But as a phenomenon that built itself around ironic appropriation, lolspeak may have no adequate defense against this type of commercial theft.
The video game industry has also have adapted to exploit the vernacular that they unintentionally helped create. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs, are a new genre of games that function as virtual communities for thousands of human players to interact in simultaneously. Popularized by huge titles such as Everquest in the late 90s and this decade’s ubiquitous World of Warcraft, gaming profits are derived by selling monthly subscriptions to players in return for access. This constitutes the sale of tickets to a lolspeak world where people can cat-cant to join in an Internet community, and this is arguably the main appeal of the purchase.
So Did You Learn Something? Probably Not, Eh?
But this just indicates how much people love to play with lolspeak, which could be the modern vernacular that touched off a whole new generational interest in language rooted simultaneously in lighthearted fun and collective power. When one journalist tried to set up an in-person interview with members of Anonymous to ask about both the campaign against Scientology and the lolspeak jargon itself, nobody in the coffee shop knew who to talk to until one individual queried another “do you like mudkips?” (Landers 2008). This multiply-enabled patois certainly signals a new form of communication with a new model for reading: where there was already the concept of the whole and complete literary work, there is now next to it a kitty pidgin that is silly, fractured, user-generated and totally irreverent of authorship. The defining concept and boundaries of the vernacular have changed as well, especially in a medium that thrives on virtual simulation. But the mysterious appeal of the vernacular will endure in lolspeak’s cyclic irony, and this new Internet vernacular will continue to involve people all over the world in finding novel ways of modeling their world and expressing themselves.
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