Leet Speak FTW

Well ladies and gentlemen, nerds and geeks, it’s another parent nightmare – teenagers have found yet another way of speaking that is incomprehensible except between themselves. What they’ve done now is upgraded their original grunts and murmurs and entirely remade it into a new way of speaking online:

“7|-|15 15 4|\| 3><4/\/\PL3 0Ph L337 5P34|<”

Understand any of that? No, neither did I. This is what that phrase reads in what I like to call English: “This is an example of leet speak”. Leet is a new form of language, coined by teenagers to use online (on Facebook for example) so parents are none the wiser.

Parents will never know that “Last night I ‘PhU(|<3D’ my girlfriend” or “I have just |<1LL3D somebody”.

Leet apparently originated within 1980s systems where having some sort of “elite” status on the system allowed the user access to file folders, games, and special chat rooms.

With me so far? Just a little bit more info and you can read on about some lovely issues surrounding this.

Anyway, leet was once the reserve of hackers, and has since entered the mainstream. It is now also used in a mocking sense, laying into “newbies” (noobs) in gaming communities”.

So there you have it. In short, it’s a new hacker influenced language that is only familiar between the users.

You can see why hackers would use it. You wouldn’t want to be on a chat-room, saying aloud blatantly “I plan to hack into the United Nation’s accounts, and need help”. It’s like playing Monopoly and asking to go to jail.

So the clever little nerds, with their endless (and downright irritating) virus knowledge, speak in this series of letters, numbers and symbols so the President of Cambodia is none the wiser when he opens an email expecting to win the Iranian Lottery and actually he’s accidently bugged the entire network. Ideas like these make me believe that one day nerds will inherit the Earth.

Anyway, I myself have seen this L337 online. As my more faithful readers know, I’m a gamer at heart, and my time is sometimes spent online PlayStation Home -  essentially a built-in online version of Sims, which gamers can use to go online and meet people and chat. Even on my first day, I was walking past groups of people speaking and every now and then you’d find people speaking like the way above. I honestly thought their PlayStation keyboards were broken or they were foreign and had different keyboard layouts. Never did it occur to me that a 3 can replace an E, an H can be written as symbols |-| or the phonology of the simple word “of” can change altogether into “oph”.

This language has even coined new words like “powned” (pronounced poon-ed or poh-n-ed) to mean “ha-ha, I just beat you/killed you/shot you” or “noob” to define a “newbie”, a newcomer to the game who is inexperienced. If you’ve ever played Modern Warfare 2 and heard someone say over their headset “Hey, let’s pown the noob!” you’ll know what I’m on about.

I just found it amusing and left them to it, and made friends with people who spoke normally. But as I allowed them to happily get along in their own technological world, this confusing new coinage has led to many controversial difficulties.

Once you scratch away the top soil of opinionated people (“Leet speak is for nerds! For people who want to sound cool but don’t”), then you actually dig up people who are scared of this development.

Parents, for one, are no longer in the loop of their offspring’s happenings; if they wish to find out if their ‘little angel’ has done their homework or just gone out and done their own thing (“get pissed”, as I believe the youths are saying these days), they can’t. They find out that their child has gone and got PI553D; which could just as easily be a court order.

The inability to understand their children really does have parents worried. You know parents; they like being in the know. Especially when it comes to finding out why their car is wrapped round a tree, the house smells of alcohol and so does their teenage son.

Blissfully unaware, I thought a person speaking like it was the new ‘fashion’. But with further research, I do find it a rather scary proposition. I find it rather difficult to comprehend a teenage slur, grunt and mumble at the best of times, but trying to work around this keyboard-banter is nigh impossible. Try it yourself; imagine being confronted in a dark alley and being asked to “hand over your backslash-backslash-backslash-backslash 4 L L 3 7”. (Wallet = \/\/4LL37). You won’t know what to do, and possibly end up getting murdered by this computer-speaking mugger.

Now, my faithful ones, you will be used to my prescriptivist (disliking language-change) views but for once I’ll be fair.

This new language (despite the scare tactics) is still a rather interesting proposition; I try to keep an open mind about these things. Well, I mean if you turn ‘water’ into ‘wa-uh-er’, I will slap you.

But I think that turning ‘water’ into ‘\/\/473r’ is actually rather clever, and the levels of dedication need to create and learn a huge, confusing second language are just inspiring. I mean, sure, Maths or English might have been a better thing to learn, but you could always get a job in an IT profession!

Leet is just another example of an anti-language. They are variations that are only familiar to the people in the know and complete gibberish to others. It’s a completely natural thing part of language; just basically people choosing their own ‘codes’ for speech and settling into them. Like buying a sofa really: choose your own, settle in, get used to it.

Anti-languages are an unavoidable occurrence really. Teenagers don’t want their parents knowing what or who they did last night but still want to ‘accommodate’ other youths with their words; the army use codes so the enemy don’t know what the plan is – that’s all fine. The appeal and basic idea of it is there and fairly understandable.

But leet also creates a sense of identity almost. If you ‘pown noobs’ or say clever words like ‘paradigm’ as “P4r4D19/\/\”, you are a gamer (and to the rest of the world, a nerd) at heart. Sure, you’re cholesterol levels may be a tad high, and your constantly-exposed-to-screens eyes may be on the point of suicide (speaking from experience here); but you’re loyal and a gamer through-and-through. And nothing will change that.

That’s the identity idea. Seen before by the Martha’s Vineyard fisherman as studied by Labov: the fishermen spoke in their own ways to create a sense of ‘fishermen’ identity, much like teens use language for a less-safe ‘street’ identity.

Language is constantly changed and manipulated in personal ways so the users can feel unique and exclusive and…well, whatever else they feel. They can do whatever they want.

Anyway, we can draw some conclusions. Leet is a complicated new language that requires a small degree and a large amount of patience to master. Gamers stole it from hackers to enjoy it for a small sense of identity and exclusivity.

And teenagers have copied an idea from some American fishermen. Lovely.

Well, I hope this small guide to L337 $P34|< has proved useful. So I say to you on an ending note: 70 4LL 7|-|3 |\|3rD$ 0U7 7|-|3r3 - $|-|0\/\/ /\/\3r('/ \/\/|-|3|\| j00r d4'/ (0/\/\3$ .

(Have fun figuring that one out!)