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Sex fetishes, I can handle. If you need to dress up - as a nurse, a fireman, Godzilla, whatever - to get your rocks off, that is, on a certain level, understandable. Human sexuality is a mysterious thing. But people who call themselves Fluffy and go into online chat rooms to hang out with other people pretending to be cats? That just confuses me.

They call themselves Meowchatters and they really love cats. Look, I love cats too. I can even understand wanting to be a cat for a while. It's the lingo that weirds me out. Because one of the hallmarks of Meowchatting is an idiosyncratic use of language that features misspellings, incorrect verb conjugations and wordplay. "Okay, effurrykit and critter ... is we reddy to head out again?" asks one cat, whose "hoomin" has taken him on a road trip.

Where the Meowchat (Cathobbyist.com/MeowChat.html) dialect evolved from is a mystery. It's hard to say if "lolcats" - a popular Internet meme consisting of photos of cats with ungrammatical captions (the "lol" is Web speak for "laugh out loud") - sprang up independently of Meowchat, or if one gave rise to the other.

"If you hear people talk to their cats, they go into a baby-talk thing," says Richard Smith, an associate professor in the school of communication at Simon Fraser University. "I guess in people's minds that's what it would be like to be a cat."

He surmises that Meowchat's linguistic peculiarities evolved because the forum is text-based, unlike Second Life, a 3-D Web-based world where becoming a chicken requires nothing more than donning a chicken suit - "no need to say 'bok bok.' " He points out that many novelists apply the vernacular to draw readers into a distinct world.

My visit to the Meowchat forum was brief: I immediately typed that I was feeling shy and, mostly to avoid having to speak in mangled baby talk, said that I was going under the couch, only to find it populated with other "cats." The Meowchatters were very welcoming and gentle but didn't seem terribly catlike to me (i.e., they were welcoming and gentle). Nobody tried to scratch out my eyes or even emitted any threatening growls.

As the room grew more crowded, someone brought out some tuna rolls. (A lot of cutely named food, such as "choco-rat-chip cookies," is offered in the forum.) These human gestures made me uneasy.

Some "cats" frisked around, play fighting, while others talked about their day.

"I almost got taken out by a set of window blinds today," said one.

"I've been pooing in the laundry room but not my LB [litter box]," said another. (It was unclear whether this was an act of spite.)

Dmitri Williams, assistant professor in the department of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, refers to phenomena like Meowchat as "liminal spaces" where "the rules get flipped on their head."

He dates it as far back as Ancient Rome, when, on the yearly holiday known as Saturnalia, "the roles of master and slave got flipped for a day."

Given the fact that cat owners often happily describe themselves as their cat's servant, very little has actually changed at all. As always, the cat holds the trump card.

Spend all the time you like online: a cat will neither prepare your dinner nor clean your bathroom.

Lisan Jutras is a Toronto-based writer and editor. She has two cats,

a Boricua dog and many garments covered in pet hair.