I’ve been traveling constantly for over five weeks now. Whenever I’m feeling annoyed, I open up my Sidekick and stare at the LOLcat Bible for a few minutes.

“Teh Ceiling Cat giv me cheezburger, teh Ceiling Cat takded mah cheezburger awai. I stil laiks teh Ceiling Cat.” — Job 1:20

I don’t know why this gives me infinite amounts of pleasure, but it really does. There’s something absolutely amazing about webfolk engaged in a collective action project to translate the bible into cat pidgin. I can’t work out whether or not these webfolk are religious, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them grew up Christian and know the bible well but aren’t practicing (many practicing folks see this as denigrating the bible, although most of my friends just think it’s damn funny).

I’m really hoping that a linguist out there will look into this phenomenon. One of the primary language sources that most linguists use to analyze languages is the bible. Missionaries went around the world translating the bible into all sorts of local languages so it’s the only source text that exists in most languages. So here we have a collective action project where webfolk somehow know the grammar of cat pidgin. But what exactly are all of those rules? How does this collective action linguistic move resemble or differ from other pidgins and creoles? I just think it’d be a fun project to linguistically suss out how this phenomenon took shape.

In the meantime, I’m happy just to read and giggle.

“Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat waz invisible, An he maded the skiez An da Urf, but he no eated it.” — Genesis 1:1

Update: Apparently, there’s a bunch of linguistic analysis. And, hackers have created LOLCat.NET