Pwned by teh leet

This week’s offering might make very little sense to most, and who can blame them? Certainly not this columnist who himself is in a state of some befuddlement. For the last one hour, he has been gamely trying to learn a new language called leet, more correctly known as 1337 or I33t. According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, leetspeak is a “sociolect variety used on the Internet, particularly in online games”, and is derived from the word elite.

Most of us who use cellphones use some basic form of leet, such as “u r” in lieu of “you are” or “b4” standing in for “before”. So far so good. But the mayhem begins when you consider that leetspeak is mostly written in numbers — that is, numbers which vaguely look like letters. So leetspeak (or leetspeek) becomes 133t5p33k, from which one can extrapolate that E=3, S=5 and L=1. Then there are the deliberate typographical errors, the commonest being “the” misspelt as “teh” or “t3h”, as well as the use of “z” in plural formation (skillz instead of skills).

Who are the speakers, or rather, writers of leet? (One cannot speak leet, just as one cannot speak Egyptian hieroglyphics.) Obviously communities on the Net, especially the young who do not want their elders to suss what they are up to. Leet is also used to bypass language filters in software — in fact, one of the first practical uses of leet occurred in the late 80s when public bulletin board administrators on the Net would try to restrict the use of unsuitable words or expressions. Leet is also used by senders of unsolicited email (technically known as spam) to get around spam filters. So you might get an email offering to sell you W1ndOws 20OO or Ph0t0sh0p, a crude sleight-of-keyboard which will nevertheless fool most computers.

Are all uses of leet, not to put too fine a point on it, illegal? Well, not always. Leet is routinely used in a perfectly innocent context by Internet gamers in communicating with each other, especially in frantic multiplayer situations. Since you can pretty much make up your own grammar and spelling, it also makes communication possible even if you don’t speak each other’s language. The word “pwn”, for example, is used to signify a resounding victory in an Internet game (did you see how I pwned him?) and has its own noun formation in “pwnage”.

Will someone one day write a novel in leet? Purists may blanch at this, but someone already has. In 1962, a certain Mr Anthony Burgess wrote a novel called A Clockwork Orange, in which the teenage Alex and his friends speak in a language called Nadsat: “Alex and his three droogs tolchock an old veck, razrez his books, pull off his outer platties, and take a malenky bit of cutter.” Translate that, o ye leetspeakers!