My family owned a cat when I was growing up, but I think the internet has taught me that I’m a doge person.
LOLcats was an early iteration of an internet meme with
some potential: amusing images of cats accompanied by intentionally
ungrammatical text was a promising combination, but ultimately it didn’t hit
the spot. This, for instance, is cute enough, but not actually funny:
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| Image by Misterjack, provided by CC licence via Wikimedia Commons |
However, if you replace the cat with an image of a happily inane
and easily impressed dog (a shiba inu), and instead of the half-baked
misspellings use a mixture of eccentric noun phrases sprinkled with the
occasional “wow”, the whole proposition becomes much more compelling. This, for example, is doge’s take on the
topic of 3D printing:
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| Image from The Daily Dot |
It works best when there is an obvious gulf between the
depth of the topic and the doge’s treatment of it. Here, for example, doge
deals with the grey zone between terrorism and civil disobedience:
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| Image from FunnyJunk |
The doge is undoubtedly inane, but like many fools, he has a
certain wisdom about him. And, to my mind, it’s especially in the field of
internet linguistics that he has a thing or two to teach us.
Doge is a good example of the internet’s tendency to provide
conditions for the development of new language varieties, at greyhound pace,
and accompanied by multiple variations. David
Crystal, writer on many linguistic things, thinks that the
internet’s influence is unprecedented in this respect.
The sort of riffing that
produced doge out of LOLcats can be witnessed all over the place. For example,
the orthodox spoken or written phrase “I can’t even begin to describe this to
you” has produced the microblogging/texting/tweeting iterations “I can’t even”,
“I have lost the ability to even”, and “I have lost all ability
to can”.
Now, I confess I don’t know
enough about the field to explain the mechanisms at play, but I imagine it has
something to do with the playful (“ludic”) way in which language is used in
many popular forms of digital communication, the need for linguistic creativity
to be expressed within tight confines in such contexts (eg Twitter/SMS
character limits, or keeping it “micro” in the case of microblogging), and the impressive
capacity of internet communication to spread: with immediacy; to a wide number
of people; and over a geographically disparate population.
All of that is very cool, but if a variety of
internet-language could venture out of its natural digital habitat and enter
the spoken language, now that would really be something.
So far, apart from a
few bits and pieces here and there, it hasn’t really happened yet. Linguistic
prescriptivists and other concerned citizens have, over the years, expressed
their fears about the threat to standard spoken and written language forms
posed by net- and sms-speak, but by and large they have not materialised. U dont
eg omit pnctu8tn or abbrv8 or use pctgrms in 4ml wrtn work lk when u r txtng.
My
personal ambition for doge is that it will make this leap. The ingredients are
all there: it’s catchy, has its
own grammar, and it doesn’t even need the doge to work.
This poem from the daysofstorm Tumblr,
for example, is a fantastic rendition of Romeo and Juliet in doge-speak:
What light. So breaks. Such east. Very sun. Wow, Juliet.
What Romeo. Such why. Very rose. Still rose.
Very balcony. Such climb.
Much love. So Propose. Wow, marriage.
Very Tybalt. Much stab. What do?
Such exile. Very Mantua. Much sad.
So, priest? Much sleeping. Wow, tomb.
Such poison. What dagger. Very dead. Wow, end.
In my own conversations, I have been trying to deploy doge
whenever possible, preferably when least appropriate. It’s quite addictive. But
getting it right takes a bit of practice – it’s all too easy to lapse into
grammatical correctness. Even “Romeo and Juliet” is not quite perfect: “much love”
probably should have been “many love” and “such poison” maybe “so poison”.
I do, of course, realise that much of this is vanity. My doge
advocacy doubtless has to do with wearing it as a badge of contemporariness and
digital savoir faire. Never mind that the doge has, no doubt, already trotted off
to the meme compost heap, tail between its legs. But that, too is the power of
the internet. We can spend a disproportionate amount of our text-consuming
lives on various forms of bloggery, either out of fun, wannabe funkiness or
just because of the sheer volume of it.
But I feel we should stay sensitised to
the way in which the internet bestows prestige on certain forms of text. Naomi
S Baron has observed that a great mass of netspeak is unmediated, ie
produced spontaneously, and in the absence of reflection, drafting, redrafting,
editing or peer-review. There is, of
course, a place for this, but the patterns of our consumption involve a risk
that the mediated text may lose something of its cultural priority. It’s
certainly an interesting point. And the doge meme is aimed squarely at this
phenomenon: we like it because, like so many of us netizens, doge has no
inhibitions about broadcasting its thoughts, moment to moment, with hilarious
superficiality on topics undeserving of such treatment.
My cat, now that I think of it, was a more reflective and
introverted type.
Perhaps I should be reconnecting with my feline side.
