May 18, 2007

Lol-lexicography

In his appeal for linguist macros, Mark Liberman writes:

And anyone with access to a supply of kitten-photos, and a linguistics course or two under their belt, ought to be able to come up with uncomputably many linguistics-oriented substitution-instances of "I'm in ur X, Y-ing ur Zs"; or "Invisible X", or "I can has Y?"; or maybe "Z: No Want".

The lol-ologists are way ahead of Mark on this one. To the right is one of the classics of the genre, created by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories last November. The inimitable Mr. Verb picked up on this one right away.

For more contributions to the "I'm in ur X, Y-ing ur Zs" snowclone frame, see this BoingBoing post. There used to be a history of the Internet meme available from Encyclopedia Dramatica (tracing it all back to the gamer's exclamation, I am in your base killing your d00ds), but their server seems to be down. You can still check out the Google cache of the page, at least for now. [Update, 5/20: Encyclopedia Dramatica is back up, though they warn that their "server is falling apart" and make an appeal for donations.]

[Update: Here's a variation on the dictionary-kitty theme, also via BoingBoing:


And yet more lol-linguistic meta-commentary, from Meme Cats...]


Posted by Benjamin Zimmer at May 18, 2007 10:40 AM