"leet" speak.

[lordlundar]

GRAH! Does this ever drive me up a wall! For the track record their are 3 types:

1. Full leet, where there are no letters meaning what they do: |\/|43 meaning mae for example.

2. Partial leet, where some of the tougher ones being not factored in: M43 again being mae

3. Crap leet: these are a group which consist of shorthand, spelling errors, slang, etc. For example: lv n0w b4 i r0x0rs ur b0x0rs. Pwnz!!!111eleventyone!!!
(leave now before I rock your underwear off. Owned!)

It's mainly the attitude that stems from the use of these. Originally, 1337 speak was used by hackers as a form of code, where if you didn't know it, you couldn't be a hacker. This was kind of a good thing, as they were (and still are) brutal to anyone who proclaims themselves as "leet" and can't prove it. Even to this day, use of the first one still typically means that you are going to get utterly destroyed on knowledge about computers and systems. Elitist much? yes, but it's acceptable, as they have the knowledge to back it up.

With games hitting mainstream and 10 year olds with a lack of parenting learning this crap "leet", to say nothing that society encouraging this (Webster officially recognizes noob for example. Not newb, but noob), I see it all over. And the claim that it is "easier to type" is crap. Look a my owned example and the translation above. Which is easier again? It simply has hit the point where someone with twitchy reflexes (caffeine much?) and a social coherence of a 3 year old wants to address their superiority over someone loudly and with as much swear words as possible. (A note, proper use of the first type of leet speak rarely if ever uses swear words, this was implemented by said children with lousy parents)

And if someone tries to speak it to me? they had better be very careful of when and how they say it. The last person said it to me when I was holding a sledge. This equates to a bad move. Luckily for him it was after a DIF so I'm in a good move. If I wasn't, I would have been led out in cuffs.

Typing "leet" and saying it simply shows that you are not mature enough to hold a proper conversation, irregardless of your age, and should never have hit mainstream as far as I'm concerned.

[blas87]

I thought leet speak was so that kids could say stuff without any grownups knowing what they were talking about...

I'm ignorant.

[Millahtyme1983]

I thought leet speak was so that kids could say stuff without any grownups knowing what they were talking about...

I'm ignorant.

Your not exactly wrong. One of the reasons kids like to use it is so parents don't know what they are talking about, but it was not the original intention.

[SportinGoods]

As someone who is a gamer, I can say leet speak it pretty much the joke of the game I play. I'm not sure that the leet speak definition is the same however, because I seriously have called another driver a noob while ranting in my car about someone cutting me off. This is an incident that caused my soon-to-be husband to torment me for months.

Sometimes it's funny, but I don't think I have ever pretended to be a hacker because I can read leet speak. If someone has, well, that sucks. I blame the popularity of tales for the leet :P

[Dreamstalker]

I'll use leet-speak very sparingly in a sarcastic vein, and confess it takes me very little extra thought to be able to read (most of the time). In the Ghostbusters RPG I ran back in the day, it was a source of endless amusement to see the odd new player being "l33t" when in the timeframe of the game it hadn't been invented yet (among other technological anomalies). The GM of the present chat incarnation of the game will not tolerate l33t at all...players engaging in such who don't knock it off after being warned are usually either eaten/possessed/killed by the monster-of-the-week or mysteriously caught in "friendly fire".

Eh, I just see excessive use as the mark of the clueless.

[Seshat]

I'm sufficiently expert in computing to have been invited to speak at various conferences. I can read leet, but rarely use it and usually only do so sarcastically.

It looks to me like it's derived from early password munging intended to defeat dictionary attacks*. Unfortunately, it's no longer sufficient to prevent dictionary attacks, as the rules can be included in generating the dictionary.

* where the cracker trying to get in tries every word in the dictionary until he lucks onto the password.

[Dreamstalker]

In a project for a networks class, I set up a password-cracker on our sandboxed class network with the express purpose of demonstrating how unsecure most passwords are; the ones with numbers-as-letters took slightly longer to crack, but not much.

Every so often an argument about l33t will crop up on one of my forums, usually relating to "how do you pronounce this?". On the same forum, members who insist on using it exclusive to regular English are banned after a few warnings.

[myswtghst]

Count me in as someone who uses leet speak mainly for humour, within a select group of friends and family. Mostly, my brother and his computer/vg obsessed friends use it sarcastically, and I tend to do the same - granted, we've now even got dad occasionally saying WTF, and mom knows what FTW means.

[BookstoreEscapee]

I'm too old to decipher leet. I sit there staring at it and go huh? If you hadn't translated I would not have figured out the first "mae" anytime in the near future...(or at all cuz I wouldn't have tried that hard).

Abbreviations like BTW, WTF, etc., I can deal with.