DOES LOLCAT HAVE A GRAMMAR?

DOES LOLCAT HAVE A GRAMMAR? To a newcomer to Lolcat [a "newbie"?], it seems that anything goes as long as it defies conventional grammar. Jonathan Hope says (in the review I referenced yesterday) that “you can’t have language that is not rule-governed”, and cites Mark Abley as saying that Lolcat is “highly rule-governed.” Abley gives examples of Lolcatters objecting to captions that “fail to use enough non-standard grammar or spelling—’Ur doin it rong!’” Annalisa likes cute pictures of cats and reads icanhascheezburger regularly. I asked her whether there were grammatical rules for Lolcat. She doesn’t think so; she thinks the submissions reflect a variety of rules and usages. It seems to me that all this demonstrates the zeal of grammarians. There is a brand new language, and already the prescriptive grammarians have taken the field.