As part of an ongoing and often ephemeral creative collaboration, elaborate virtual worlds are created, such as CatHobbyist.com's MeowChat Village, where cats meet, marry, have careers, adopt kittens and tease and comfort their human companions. There are also MeowChat virtual towns, stores, political campaigns, armies, universities and television networks that find more permanent form in mailing list archives and message boards.

Part of the MeowChat world is MeowChat itself -- the language used by the cats. While there are cats who converse in conventional English, most of them use a language comprised of equal parts phonetic spelling, puns and baby talk. A classic example is the story of the first Thanksgiving, as told by the MeowChat Village Hisstorian:

"we know dat da pillbugs camed here frum da old comfy, but we not know why and how, aftpurr dey landed at plywood rock, did dey get to meowchatvillage?"

The answer to that question involves a long sea voyage to escape a major flea infestation and eventual settlement in a magical land known as MeowChat Village, where all the animals live in peace. Or, actually, "peas."

Many cat owners object to having the cats use anything other than perfect English, reasoning that felines are highly refined, intelligent creatures. According to Kathy Gittel's MeowChat FAQ (ostensibly written by the cats themselves):

"We are highly intelligent. Some of us have difficulty spelling because our paws don't fit the human keyboard or because we telepathically send our posts to our humans, who type them for us, and something gets lost in the translation."

The humans behind the cats are a surprising mix, mostly women and a few men.