The Friday Fillip

Because PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii are due out today and Sunday, respectively, I thought it might be appropriate to make a very brief visit to one small aspect of an internet subculture. Gaming is not something I do — though I suspect that within it lies much of all our digital futures, law people’s included — so I’m going to deal only with a part of gamer language — “leet” or “leetspeak”.

What is it? Leet is a kind of cant or jargon designed to create a community in the know and to exclude all others, rather like law, when you come to think of it. In fact “leet” is a shortened form of “elite.”

Rather than invent new words, though there are some in leet, leetspeakers (who really write more than speak) pervert the spelling or form of current words, which is why the really good Wikipedia article on it calls leet a cipher. “Leet” itself is a good example. It might be written 1337, because if you turn 1337 upside down you get . There are other letter-to-number transpositions that can be used right side up, such as 5 for S and 4 for A; though, there’s no one-to-one correspondence here, and S might just as well be $. As well z gets used for s but typically only at the end of a word; thus, “warez,” which is “wares” as in software (not the Mexican town Juarez). This last example shows that there’s no rule about how many transpositions or transformations are used in a word: there may be only one.

Some new words have emerged, the most popular one, perhaps, being “w00t,” an exclamation of joy. Others, for example, are “kekeke,” for laughter, taken from Korean; “pwn,” referring to someone’s superiority in a game; and “n00b,” for newbie, a person new to something.

I’ve only scratched the surface here, and it may be a good time to warn about “little learning,” as the author of ElectricBiscuit’s Guide to Simple Leet Speak does. I’ll use his words because they put it just right:

Realize, first, before you use these words… They are not cool. I mean, they are cool, but they aren’t. Simple Leet Speak’s main objective is to sound akin to a twelve year old. They were probably originated by a twelve year old. Why? Because they were borne forth from this ether by the gaming community, and possibly warez community…

Realize, that it is not cool to use these words. As I stated above, they’re meant to sound stupid, childish, and lame… Also, think before you use them. The margin of error for usage of these words is high… You might feel inclined to use them improperly. Don’t. True gamers will laugh at you.

But where’s the fun in such timidity? Because you’ll want more, check out the Wikipedia article referred to above and the ElectricBiscuit piece. There’s also a good article by James Thornton. And for the lazy among us, there are a number of translators or converters that will change English into leet with the push of a button:

• http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/leet.php, which actually let’s you adjust the percentage of leet you want,
• http://home.no.net/hellshl/main/translate.html, which also can translate into something called “|_|17|2@” (try searching Google for that!), and
• http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/l/leetspea.htm

I thought it might be fun to use them to find out what “slaw” would be in leet. They gave me: 514w, $£4\/\/, and $|@\X/. My own version (“sleet”?) would have it: ^^V75, which you’ll need to turn upside-down to appreciate.

And now that you’re versed, head on over to Google-H4x0r and see if you can make sense out of it. Might become your SE of choice, d00d.