Accidental Blogger

Between cats and bad spelling, things can really get out of hand!  So reports Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle.

Computer geeks have their own niche in pop culture. Sometimes, something crazed from that niche escapes and runs rampant among the masses.

Now working its way into the popular consciousness is something far more bizarre and — depending on your point of view and sense of humor — either very funny or irritatingly cutesy.

For the last few months, online regulars have been seeing on various Web sites and blogs pictures of cats and other animals in strange poses, with large type captions embedded in the photos. The grammar and syntax in the captions are atrocious by design. The pictures are called LOLcats, named after the abbreviation for "laughing out loud" used by fans of text and instant messaging.

The origin of LOLcats is murky at best. From what I can tell based on various blog posts — the most authoritative at LinguisticMystic.com, written by a Colorado linguistics student — they may have evolved from a practice called Caturday, in which cat lovers posted photos of their felines with funny captions on Saturdays.  The cat-photo fad then merged with some other geek jokes. The mangled spelling associated with texting and gaming known as leetspeak — teh for the, ur for your, hai for hi, 1337 for "leet" or elite, and so on — became part of the gag.