Commenter Adm points to the LOLCat Bible, which will of course make you laugh if you're a student of this kind of Intertubes Esoterica, and if you aren't will make you back away in baffled horror like John McCain stumbling into a midnight Rocky Horror screening. E.g. Matthew 7:1, which I trust we're familiar with:
1 "If u juj u wil be jujded. So don't.2 Bcz u will be jujded teh saem az u jujded teh othr d00d.
Well, okay then. But I read around the texts, and of course the LOLCat Bible is a community translation project--if one person had done this on their own, it would be enormously disturbing. But of course that means that the quality and tone are all over the place. [Just like in the REAL Bible d00d!!!111 OMG!] I thought Psalm 137 was a bit disappointing. (By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept, etc.) It's even more overused than "Teh Second Coming," but it's been a deeply affecting poem for twenty-five centuries or so--you expect it to deliver the goods. And "Kthx fer teh fluids of Babylon we were all like, n0000000001!11!! when we faut back bout Zion?" OK, maybe.
But this is linguistically complicated. LOLspeak (I CAN HAS CHEESEBURGER?) isn't exactly the same as Message Board-speak which isn't quite the same as Gamer/ Hacker slang (pwnd!!11) which is not quite the same TextmessageSpeak, though obviously they're all closely related. And I'm not fluent in any of them, really. (Hell, when I have to send text messages I use commas and quotation marks and stuff because it hurts my brain not to.) But I guess you could look at this "Bible" as a noble attempt at some kind of Grand Synthesis of Post-Literate Digital Prose Styles.
I can sympathize. After all, I'm a Synthesizer by calling. I know approximately two facts about approximately every subject ever. I guess maybe I'm supposed to explain everybody to everybody else. Sigh.
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But this is linguistically complicated. LOLspeak (I CAN HAS CHEESEBURGER?) isn't exactly the same as Message Board-speak which isn't quite the same as Gamer/ Hacker slang (pwnd!!11) which is not quite the same TextmessageSpeak, though obviously they're all closely related.
This reminds me of my biggest pet peeve about all those apocalyptic "Oh noes! Txting is teh lame! It's ruining our language!" editorials. And it's not the fact that the "Young people's X is ruining our culture" trope is as least as old as Socrates. No, it's the fact that to illustrate "texting language" they always freakin' use LOL and ROTFL and IMHO and other acronyms that *pre-date* text-messaging and come from message board/chat room usage, which the dinosaurs among us were using when Mulder and Scully had shoe-sized cell phones.
And yeah, LOLSpeak has its own grammar. And font. The font is key.
Btw, I am aware of all internet traditions.
Te-hee.
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