Blah blah blah teens suck at writing blah blah chatspeak blah....
Language that makes you say OMG
Ok. Fine. Whatever. But I think it's a stretch to blame LOLCats for this.
Linguistic butchery while texting is one thing. In school assignments, it is quite another. What's worse is how popular culture is encouraging this madness. A notorious offender called ICanHasCheezburger.com is a cute enough diversion -- it posts adorable pictures of cats, "lolcats" as they're called, with funny captions. But persevere beyond your first gag reflex and you'll notice that the captions are written in lolspeak.
Lolspeak has its own wiki-dictionary online -- sorry, a dikshunary -- where fanatics go to linguistically out-mangle one another. A recent entry on ICanHasCheezburger.com featured a cat looming over a laptop with the caption: "Just when u thot it wuz safe 2 go bak on teh interwebs." Another features a kitten: "why ur hed just asplode? wuz it my cuteness? sry."
Why did my head just "asplode," kitty dear? Because I could not transcribe that caption without Microsoft Word's AutoCorrect going into overdrive. And because ICanHasCheezburger.com receives 50 million page views every single month. Only 50% of users are between 18 and 49 -- which means a large chunk of the under-18 set is picking up lolspeak when they should be learning English.
LOLCats - bringing down Western civilization since... 1997?
Well the beeping went away so my plan worked!
If that isn't a "get offa my lawn" story, I don't know what is.
ETA re the LOLcats are ruining the youth of America story.
I believe he sent out a press release after Jerry Falwell's death claiming Falwell was going to hell for compromising with the godless.
Did he picket the funeral?
Blah blah blah teens suck at writing blah blah chatspeak blah....
I was just laughing at work about this, because my coworker and I were talking about this book we had both read that included a ton of letters written between lovers in the 1830s, and how a similar book written about our time would be all emails like, "LOL. see u l8er. ilu!!"
Did he picket the funeral?
I remember that he planned to, though I'm not sure if he actually managed or not.
And I think lolspeak, given that it does have its own internal consistency (there is such a thing as bad lolspeak, after all), makes a pretty good tool for talking about lanuage and grammar. I don't know if people are using it (I should ask my mother), but I remember reading something online about it. Anyone remember that?
Anyone remember that?
Yes -- in both Languagelog and BoingBoing, maybe a year ago?
I'm so disappointed, reading the NYTimes reviews of the SmartCar--they're all negative. And not in ways that you can be like "Oh, they just don't appreciate it" but like "It only gets 30ish mpg" and "it shifts like ass". Dang. But I totally agree that it ought to be getting mad gas mileage.
