Indulge me here, dear reader (you know who you are) while I regale you with a story of how a joke can be pushed a little too far – even on the internet, where the boundaries of taste and other things differ wildly from real life.
Lolcats – and lolcat speak – thatz liek soooo last year. What started off as an internet meme on message boards like 4Chan (caveat lector), and was popularized further by the big hitters in internet time-wasting, Digg and Reddit is now being written about in major publications. OK, they think it’s a new thing, and there are probably many slow news days, who am I to cast the first stone? Lolcat speak is a combination of purposely misspelled words and phrases, and the baby talk some people use when talking to their cats. In case you are reading this and haven’t had access to the internet for a couple of years, it can be best explained visually, here.
Why the fuss? Well, I recently learned that there has been a concerted effort over some months to translate The Bible into LOLCat. I understand that people like to introduce their favourite flavour of religion to others, and I have no problem with that per se, except when standing in my dressing gown, hung over, at 8.00 on a Sunday morning, but I digress. In case you’re simply itching to know what shape such an enormous collective effort might take, here’s a taster. I have chosen the first five verses of Genesis, as at least most people brought up in a Christian country will have an idea how they should look:
1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.
2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.
4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.
5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1
Some might say that however the message of The Bible reaches people matters not, as long as they are reading it, but even from my atheist viewpoint, it would be a sad day for Christians worldwide if their religion was reduced to a badly-spelled internet gag.
Quite apart from any religious angle, when it comes to such things, I find myself reflecting on the fictitious quote by Samuel Johnson in the Blackadder TV series: “…like fitting wheels to a tomato. Time consuming and completely unnecessary”.
