Actually, I've been fascinated by internet dialects for years--the emoticons, the asterisk stage directions, the text games, and the wordplay are very interesting topics to me--I do a lot of term papers on that subject.

Once I tried explaining to my aunt that there's a dialect you use on the internet, and she asked me very seriously, "How do I go about learning it? Are there classes?"

I had to resist the urge to give her the LOLcats URL and say it was an online tutorial. I ALMOST DID.