I’m not really a cat person, honest.  But there’s something about these “Lolcats” that makes me LOL.

If you’re uninitiated, or in need of a fix, visit icanhascheezburger and you can has a flavor.

Lolcat is a compound word that joins “lol” (“laugh out loud”) with “cat,” as in the tasty kitty pictured above.  The idea is to take a photo of a cat (or cats) and superimpose a gramatically-butchered caption. 

The Lolcat pidgin “grammar” is not random, though; it’s mutating (rapidly) and David McRaney’s piece on its origins and evolution introduces the most prominent memes and provides an analysis. 

I find this linguistic mutation absolutely fascinating – and hilarious.  I’m a jumble of contradictions: I refuse to contractions like “r u coming 2 the pub,” even in text messages, but I’m intrigued by how modern forms of written communication seem to be accelerating the mutation of human languages and the formation of new “dialects” like “1337speak” and this lolcat thing. 

Computer languages have also evolved over the years to become (among other things) more efficient, or pragmatic, or domain-oriented.  Or… absurd.

LOLCode is a programming language that uses the Lolcat syntax.  Here’s “Hai World” in Lolcode:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYE

(edit: and I can’t resist, one more program showing a variable declaration and a loop:)

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
     UP VAR!!1
     VISIBLE VAR
     IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE 

(edit: There’s now a .NET compiler for LOLCode and a Microsoftie is going to present it at TechEd Australia!) 

I’ve been laughing at Lolcats for a few weeks.  I bring this up now because stray cats were everywhere in Dahab, using their charm and wits to abscond with as much food as possible.  I hope I’ll get at least one Lolcat image out of their mugshots. 

And if I wanted to take it to the next level, I’d make a Silverlight-based Lolcat generator akin to the LolBuildr.

kthxbye.