What is this LOL bizniz all about? I'll say what nobody else wants to: cultural and linguistic ghettoization.

The image macro is nothing new; its first identifiable artifact, the O RLY? Bubo scandiacus, dates back to at least 2003. (Curiously, the snowy owl seems to eschew flights into the more contemporary Charles de Gaulle International.) Now its scope has widened to the extent that anything can be a LOLthing, needing only an extremely basic command of what we shall term LOLspeak to be considered as such.

And what is LOLspeak? LOLinguist Anil Dash defines the LOLcat phenomenon as "the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and overlaying absurdist captions on the images." For the sake of brevity we refer to the dialect of these captions as LOLspeak, But we will not be among the throngs of poseurs to address its morphological intricacy. Instead, today we focus on its primary function as a mode of expression: LOL and its literature are, far from an efficacious little bleat of joy, an agonized cri de coeur.

Upon due meditation, Dash retracted his classification of the language as "cweeole" — a creole language necessarily contains elements of at least two different mother tongues, and so far these cats have limited their pathetic attempts at speech to a broken English. Most recently, LOL has been correctly termed a form of pidgin, as cats and other species such as tapirs and gays use it to communicate their extremely primitive interests and thought processes to English-speaking humans.

Or so we like to tell ourselves. Do the sad LOLcat eyes gazing back at us from the mirror of the monitor bring to mind the distant memory of any other historically disenfranchised group, once defamed in grotesque caricatures and mangled pronouncements"? That's right: I sho'ly does be equatins' LOLcats to mammy dolls and minstrel shows.

In both cases, we attribute a hideous countenance and laughable locution to the subjects, robbing them at once of face and voice: in a word, of their identities. This lets us immure these miserable creatures in JPEG files and blithely squabble over what they might be trying to say as these pathetic animals gaze out at us from within their pixilated prisons, their every sans-serif caption an obvious cry for help. They starve and beg for succor. They are relentlessly persecuted by their various natural predators (shuttlecocks, Coke Zero) and plead for sanctuary. Like all beings they need and thrive on love and affection — and have the grace to seek it frankly.

In response we harrow, mock and bait them and build websites like torture gardens to compete for title of most depraved sadist. If a society is to be judged by how it treats its least fortunate members, and these animals do indeed represent a sentient species intent on communication with us, then we so-called humans now stand condemned for our perpetration of this LOLocaust.

— Eve Adams (ultimaluz at gmail dot com)