Forwarded from: James Pavlik [Try this: http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/ :) - WK] I agree with the spirit of Cecil's remarks, but Leet also confounds most text recognition software. Like pig Latin, if you cannot translate on the fly, the information becomes noise. To text scanners, the entire conversation is broken and garbled, I.E. Noise. This is seen as a benefit for those that may have computer literate parents or others that actually monitor their kids activities on the net. like pig Latin was cryptography for the sesame street crowd, rot13 in the early Arpanet/internet days, today's gen( XYZ? ) have "invented" leet. Once you learn the rules, it is not a mystery, and I am sure that as we old duffers speak, somebody is coding a l33t5p33k to English translation programming routine to assist the over 25 crowd and "big brother" keep up. but for those folks that have to call the kids to "FIX" the VCR because it is flashing 12:00 again, its perfect. do you grok it? James Pavlik Forwarded from: William Knowles <wkat_private> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030110.html 10-Jan-2003 Dear Cecil: I have an Armchair University degree in English linguistics, and I was thinking about the "l33t5p33k" we see on the Net these days, as well as the Princification of the language, the replacement of "you" with "u" and "to" with "2," etc. Is this just bad English, or is this the next step? Will the English language in 100 years look like the rantings of a 15-year-old hacker as we see it now, and will numbers become letters (1 = I, 2 = to, 3 = E, 4 = for, 5 = S, etc)? --Montfort, via the Straight Dope Message Board Cecil replies: <SNIP> Now comes 133t5p33k, proof that the flames of intergenerational antagonism burn as brightly as ever. Used mainly by teenage chat-room geeks, gamers, and wannabe h4x0r5 (hackers), 133t5p33k replaces standard letterforms with others looking vaguely similar, e.g., 1 for L, 3 for E, 5 for S, and so on (see www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet for a rundown). Thus 133t5p33k transliterates to "leetspeek." The uninitiated will now ask: What's a leet? It's short for elite, j00 14m3r (j = Y, 4 = A). No one is sure where the name came from, but the meaning is clear enough: Only the elite (i.e., your friends, who are definitely not over 40) are supposed to understand it. Leet involves multiple layers of coding, the better to trip up the unhip. Thus "you are" becomes u r, "the" is purposely misspelled t3h (leetists have adopted common typos as a point of pride), K3W1357 means kewlest/coolest, w4r3z (wares) is slang for pirated software, and so on. [...] - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 06:47:36 PST