LOLcats and I Can Has Cheezburger?

2007

Date: 11 January 2007 · Place: Honolulu, Hawaii · Figures: Eric Nakagawa, founder · Kari Unebasami, co-founder · Tags: Image Macro, LOLspeak, Blog Network 01. A Single Picture On A Hawaiian Server On 11 January 2007, Eric Nakagawa posts a single picture to a free domain he registers as icanhascheezburger.com. The image, a grey British Shorthair with mouth agape and the caption I Can Has Cheezburger?, has circulated on the Something Awful forums since 2006. Nakagawa and his collaborator Kari Unebasami begin posting one captioned cat per day. Within ten months the site is doing 1.5 million page views per day. Pet Holdings Inc. acquires it for a reported 2 million dollars in September 2007, the first major financialization of a single meme format. 02. LOLspeak As A Constructed Dialect The captioning convention, called LOLspeak or kitty pidgin, stabilizes a grammar with broken verb agreement, present participle overuse, and the dropped article. Linguist Lauren Gawne and others study it as a constructed online dialect, a written register with no spoken correlate. Impact font white with black stroke, top and bottom of frame, becomes the default image macro typographic skin for the next decade. Sources • KnowYourMeme, 'LOLcats' • Time Magazine, 'Lolcats Goes Big Time' (16 July 2007) • Lauren Gawne and Jill Vaughan, 'I Can Haz Language Play' (Australian Linguistic Society, 2011)