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It's a good time to be a cat on the Internet. Of course, it has never been a bad time; the creatures were co-opted as the Web's mascots from its inception.

Wherever there's been an online forum, or a home page, or a blog with nothing much to say, there have been pictures of cats. Then came YouTube, and lo, there were cat videos too.

None of which quite accounts for the latest oddball phenomenon to sweep the place. For reasons that nobody can quite explain - and not for lack of trying - the Internet is recently awash in photos of cats who are speaking like little hackers. "IM IN UR FRIDGE," says one cat, "EATIN UR FOODZ." A cat rolled up in a blanket says, "I IS BURRITO." Another yowling cat has been immortalized beneath the caption, "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?"

You get the idea. Talking cats aren't exactly new on the cultural stage (the inexplicable continued existence of Garfield springs to mind), but the notion that they might only be able to belt out mangled, unpunctuated exclamations has proved surprisingly appealing to the online masses.

The fad is called "lolcats" - the "lol" stands for "laughing out loud" in online jargon - and it's more than a genre for ridiculing cats; it's becoming a shorthand for describing an exaggerated, faintly derogatory way of speaking.

Suddenly, it's cropping up everywhere. That "cheezburger" picture, for instance, spawned a whole website, icanhascheezburger.com, devoted to cataloguing thousands of images that caption cats in much the same way. Other lolcats sites abound: for starters, see lolcats2.com and macrocats.com.

Just like so many me-too fads before it, lolcats is an exercise in mass participation, a bandwagon that anyone with a cat, a camera and a bit of software can hop aboard. Most contributions are variations on a theme, which makes things easier.

The "cheezburger" picture, for instance, led to a raft of derivatives that either involve the phrase "I can haz," cheeseburgers, or both. One follow up has a mewling kitten wedged in a bun, beneath the caption, "HALP I NOT CHEEZBURGER" In fact, the consensus seems to be that "HALP" is what cats say when they're in a bind, and there's a whole subset of images using that term too. There is also a visual style to be abided by: Captions are white block capitals with black outlines, banded across the pictures without speech or thought bubbles.

And the fad is not limited to cats: The same language and visual style are being applied to pictures of other animals: walruses, bunnies, George W. Bush ("I HAS A BUDGET"). Someone captioned an entire episode of Star Trek in the same dumbed-down style. (Google for "loltrek," naturally.) It's entertaining.

The fad originated in online discussion forums where images are often posted instead of written dialogues, as a form of visual repartee. Sometimes, an expressive animal photo is worth 1,000 words. Meanwhile, the mangled syntax is drawn from the dialects of video gamers and hackers, who methodically misspell words to reinforce a sense of community, which has the happy bonus of confounding outsiders.

What's harder to explain is why mashing kittens together with gamer-speak proved catchy enough to start popping up across the mainstream Internet.

To be sure, the meme nails an ineffable truth about cats: They really only have one idea on their minds at any given time - and even then, they're not quite sure how to articulate it. Cats don't think one thing and say another, they just exist with the simplicity of purpose of a boldface caption.

But Anil Dash, a noted online entrepreneur, has a better idea. He rather ingeniously speculated that lolcats aren't misspeaking English, but are in fact speaking a kind of "kitty pidgin," a real language that has been invented as a middle ground between English and the inscrutable language of cats.

Dash is onto something: The garbled Internet-speak that led to lolcats has always been drawn to bad translations, especially the Asian kind. Years ago, a snippet of poorly translated video game dialogue, "All your base are belong to us," became a fad just like lolcats, and it has stayed wedged in the mass consciousness ever since.

Looking back on it now, "all your base are belong to us" sounds a lot like something a lolcat might say. Could it be that this trend amounts to laughing at animals who are speaking in the methodical, if backward, way of foreigners?

Almost, but not quite. What's at issue here is language itself. The popularity of lolcats, I think, is a reaction to a fear that all that is decent, meaningful and properly conjugated is under attack by the Internet and its motley crew.

It's so easy to feel besieged by gibberish, online and off. It surrounds us these days. You can see it in the stripped-down, indecipherable text messages that kids send to each other. It's in the knuckle-headed grunts that pass for comments after YouTube videos. It's in every spam message we get. It pervades the parts of the Internet that might speak your language, but are so steeped in their own jargon and hare-brained in-jokes, that they seem to be saying nothing at all. You know, the parts that come up with words like "lolcats."

Lolcats caught on because the idea laughs at what bugs people about the Internet: the prospect of watching language crumble at the hands of teenagers, hackers, gamers and illiterates, until we're all reduced to screaming half-formed, all-caps imperatives at each other.

So we cast the cats as not just mascots for the Internet, but icons of everything that's wrong with it, too: our sock puppets to represent the online underclass. On consideration, it might not be the best time to be a cat on the Internet. As a reluctant lolcat would put it, DO NOT WANT.

Quick clicks

LOLCAT BUILDR

Should you want to produce your own Lolcat pictures (understandable), but feel that spending more than five minutes on it might not be the best use of your resources (wise), check out the fantastic LolCat Buildr (kscakes.com/LolCats). This site will automatically combine a cat photo of your choosing with a caption of your own mangling. Now, you can populate the Internet with nonsense faster than ever before

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE NOTES

Nostalgic for the days of living with housemates? Beat the sentiment out of yourself here: passiveaggressivenotes.wordpress.com. Drawing on submissions from the world's hectored souls, it showcases sad notes like the one that reads, "Please refrain from leaving piles of work and/or random things on my chair while I'm away It makes me want to poke my eyes out" Which is immediately followed by a heart shape and a thank you, of course.

I.T.

webseven@globeandmail.com