U&PU is a blawg,
which lawyer/blogger Denise Howell (Bag and Baggage) defined as
"a web log written by lawyers and/or concerned primarily with legal affairs."

Topics shall also include
- linguistics (often as it relates to law)
- politics and current events
- philosophy and jurisprudence, and naturally
Stuff Worth Reading, which includes books, articles, posts, caselaw, and more.

Read, share, and enjoy. Some rights reserved.

Unused and Probably Unusable

-- a linguistically inclined blawg

Friday, June 8, 2007

What's LOLcat for Lawyer?
I didn't want to go down this road. Like most folks interested in language and linguistics, I read Language Log, and like most folks aware of internet memes, I'd visited I Can Has Cheezburger, which was first discussed on LL in a post titled Kitty Pidgin and Asymmetrical Tail-wags. As discussed, LOLcats involve image macros, i.e. pictures of [cats] with text that fits a meme or macro overlaid. Text of the form "I can has X?" or "I'm in your X, Ying your Z" or whatever. Only spelled worse, and with bad grammar. Intentional misspellings and bad syntax, that is. Engrish and worse. See the useful wikipedia page on Lolcats for more information.

Anyway... it didn't stop at cats. As Mark Liberman of LL recently pointed out, there are PhiLOLsophers. There's pictures out there of any given cute or uncute thing, with images of the same sort overlaid.

And... I had to jump in.

Here follow my contributions. Is it LOLlaw? LOLlawyers? Or can someone come up with something better?

The best three first, and then one that didn't come out as well. Click for larger versions. No rights reserved. Please credit Unused & Probably Unusable.

A local Philly piece of history:
O HAI I HAS PROTECKTD UR HABEAS

From Hamdan v. Rumsfeld:
I CAN HAS GENEVA PROTECTIONS?

Thurgood Marshall on the steps:
NO SEPRT BUT EQUAL - DO NOT WANT

And the first version of the above, with a different caption:
IM IN UR CRTS DISMNTLNG UR SEGRGASHUN

All images made with ROFLbot, http://wigflip.com/roflbot/.