Did you know the ancient Egyptians wrote their hieroglyphs without vowels and we can still understand them? I am sure the 140 character limit for Twitter tweets are also driving the masses to Leet.ĭespite sometimes being deliberately abstruse and celebrating incorrectness, Leet speak is a highly dynamic communication medium. I am certainly guilty of the occasional unbecoming abbreviation or (gasp!) leaving out the occasional vowel, especially when texting or trying to type on a small keypad. Leet speak has developed from an obscure communication system into a cultural phenomenon, widely and increasingly used in online games, chat rooms, text messaging, instant messaging, websites and wider electronic communication. In the next post I will look at how Leet speak is spreading across languages. Some slang terms made popular by Leet speak, such as lol and owned ( pwned, meaning to dominate or reduce one’s status) produce Google search results in the hundreds of millions. A BBC explanation of leet speak, in 2002, was less alarmist and now, in 2009, it appears as though Leet speak is here to stay. Microsoft published a a Leet primer for parents, which missed the main reason for the popularity of the sublanguage and seemed to be aimed at determining whether ‘children’ were involved in illegal online activities. Anyway, those who didn’t use Leet, saw it, at best, as a technique for keeping parents in the dark and, at worst, as evidence that their children were involved in nefarious, illegal activities! The youthful howls of consternation at these views are I think largely justified, as most users will tell you Leet speak is used primarily to reduce keystrokes.ĭespite these reservations, Leet’s expansion into popular youth culture could not be ignored. I am not sure about the above, I generally show my mating fitness by beating my chest and winking. Lol u r n00b – I am laughing at you newbie (rookie).
Apparently, throughout human existence, males have demonstrated their mating fitness by inventing and displaying new and innovative communication forms. You are all imagining the expression on the faces of your English teachers, right? At worst, Leet was seen as a corrupt, exclusionary form of the English language and a manifestation of adolescent male attitudes of competition. The original aim of Leet speak in the 1980s was to use alternate characters to get past restrictive text editors (which I will look at in the next post), but today, Leet speak is used primarily to reduce the number of keystrokes used in various forms of communication.Īfk brb bio, is much quicker to type than its intended meaning, ‘I am away from keyboard, will be right back, I am going to the toilet’. Other popular examples of 1337 include, warez (plural shortening of ‘software’), n00b (‘newbie’ or ‘rookie’), haxor (‘hacker’). 7#15 B1()& r00xor means ‘this blog rocks (is fantastic).’ l33t embraces abbreviation, acronyms, misspellings and typos (see the fat cat image), synonyms, punctuations marks, phonetic combinations and homographic substitution (in which similar looking letters, punctuation marks or graphics represent the correct letter). Basic Leet speak replaces letters with various combinations of predominantly numeric characters. The dynamic sublanguage Leet (from ‘elite’) has been widely used on the internet and as part of informal electronic communication for over ten years, and is now a fixed part of popular internet culture and language. Have you come across the acronyms lol (laugh out loud) or brb (be right back) from texting or instant messaging? Perhaps you have lazily texted or typed C u 2mrw (see you tomorrow)? Are you a fan of the hugely popular Lol Cats with their sometimes strange but often hilarious captioning language? Welcome to Leet speak.
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