1f y0u c4n r34d 7h15, 7h3n y0u r 1 0f 7h3 “3|173″ f0|k5 wh0 h4v3 b36un 70 cr38 4 n3w |4n6u463.
Actually “3|173″ there is more commonly written “3|337″ since misspelling is as important to L337SP33K as anything else.
I find this fad to be fundamental clique behavior of the sort that is common in middle school and high school, and I am vaguely disturbed by the fact that it is gaining popularity in the mainstream world. We have enough communication issues in the world without purposefully mangling the language just to “50und c00|”.
I can see a use for this when text messaging from a phone that does not have a full keyboard and hunting for the proper letter is a pain in the tail. But when you have a full keyboard at your disposal and you do it anyway, then I don’t get it at all.
6 users commented in " L337SP33K "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThirty years ago when I was in elementary school, we used to call this “Rebus”.
Hehehe…I can read that and that is funny. I never really speak in leet speak but understand it because of the gaming world. So many people use it when playing MMORGs and other online games, that if you want to play the game you kinda need to understand leet speak or you will be lost. Some of it makes sense because it shortens words or phrases, while others are just plain stupid and take more thought. These examples that you show above definitely fall under the stupid category, but other such as “LOL”, “OMG”, “IMHO” are all considered leet speak and are kinda useful if you are trying to type a quick message to your friend or foe….IMHO
I agree with that, and acronyms can be called “leetspeak” but LOL has been around a long, long time, even back in the snail mail days (where it meant “lots of love”).
I have no problem with using shorthand that expresses things in a clear and concise way, such as emoticons, ROFLMAO, etc. Those make sense to me.
But typing numerical versions of words when you have a full keyboard to work with and it is faster to type it normally just seems silly to me. And using it in carefully composed text (such as a newspaper article, or a blog post) just seems pretentious. And I have a very low threshold for pretentiousness.
Agreed. I don’t even know how long it would take me to type a leet-like sentence with numbers included AND I am sure I would have to double check it a few times after I typed it.
N00bs.
5N0b
Leave A Reply