| >> | No.14 >>13
I haven't read that book, but I find the various internet dialects that have emerged over the years quite interesting - you can roughly pinpoint what part of the internet someone's from, and at what time they arrived, just based on how they type. On that topic, and for the sake of cultural preservation, I'd like to call attention to some of the various attributes of early-to-mid-2000s era leetspeak and other aspects of the old "digital retardation" netspeak, and more importantly, how it can be distinguished from newer forms of netspeak. The reason why is because I've noticed a lot of people DOING IT WRONG in recent years, even on Heyuri and SH. There's also not a whole lot of in-depth information on it out there as far as I've seen (at least not beyond the basic "letters are replaced with numbers/symbols and words are spelled phonetically" aspect), and most of what info does exist is written by outsiders to internet culture who weren't using it themselves. You virtually never see it in the wild anymore, and it's also been heavily distorted by things that were introduced at later dates (as well as deterioration from the natural passage of time), so I imagine it's nigh on impossible to learn it via lurking moar if you weren't around 15~20 years ago, back when it was fairly ubiquitous. Much of the early-to-mid-2000s leetspeak and old netspeak (I'm just gonna call it "leetspeak" for short from here on) derived from the phreaking and hacking scenes of the 80s and 90s. By the time of the late 90s/early 2000s it was something primarily used for humorous effect, and to make fun of those who took themselves too seriously. It certainly involved a lot of "typing like a retard", but it was a zany, highly-exaggerated, "pretending to be a wannabe badass/hacker/gamer while also on crack" kind of retarded - we weren't typing as if we were weeaboos from gaia online, teenage girls from myspace, or the /s4s/fags in present times that appear to be emulating brain-damaged 5 year olds (more on those later). The leetspeak of the early-to-mid 2000s had a very specific set of words, phrases, syntax, and other characteristics, and we rarely deviated from them. It almost never involved making shit up on the spot, as the various components of it were effectively the memes of their day - if you did it wrong, you outed yourself as a l4m3r n00b, which was something you generally wanted to avoid (even if you were just using it to make fun of those who used it seriously). This is not a definitive list, and you would almost never use it all at once or try to jam it all into a single sentence, but some of the commonly used elements include: - Numbers in place of similar-looking vowels - predominantly "o"s and "e"s, to a lesser extent "a"s, and rarely ever "i"s or "u"s (e.g. sp33k, st00pid, phr33k/phr34k, w00t, d00d, t33ns, 0wn3d)
- Rearranging/replacing vowels while still retaining the same phonetic pronunciation (liek, haet, hueg, moar, rawr, nao, wat, hai, bai)
- Single letters and numbers in place of words with the same phonetic sound (e.g. you -> u, are -> r, to/too -> 2, for -> 4)
- "z" in place of "s" on certain plurals for extra badass (e.g. warez, guyz, girlz)
- "x" in place of "ck/cks" (e.g. hax, sux, bux)
- "noob/n00b" in place of "newbie"
- "j00" in place of "you" (derives from the fact that most Germanic languages pronounce "j" like the English "y")
- "j00r" or "ur" in place of "your/you're"
- "00" in place of phonetic "oo" sounds in general
- "teh" in place of "the", often placing it in front words you normally wouldn't, predominantly adjectives (e.g j00 r t3h st00pid, ur m0m is teh sex0rz, zOMG ur pen0r is teh long!!1)
- "owned/pwned" when someone gets dominated/raped
- 'd in place of -ed (e.g. pwn'd, hax'd, troll'd, LOL'd)
- -x0rz, -z0rz, and other -0r suffixes appended to certain nouns (e.g. hax0rz, sux0rz, r0x0rz, lolz0rz, pen0r)
- Pretending to mispress the shift key out of excitement/shock (e.g. zOMG, !!!!11, !!!!!!11111111!!1one!!1!!!11eleven!!1) (sarcasm increases with more exclamation marks)
- Common initialisms like LOL, ROFL, WTF, GTFO, STFU, and popular variations of them (e.g. lawl, LOLOLOL, LOLLERSKATES, LOLLERCOASTER, LOLLERCAUST, roffle, ROFLCOPTER, WTFBBQ, WTFHAX) - predominantly capitalized but not always
- Misnaming "the internet", and appending it with an "s" like a stereotypical old person might (e.g. internets, interwebs, intranets, intrarwebs)
- Miscellaneous commonly used words and phrases (e.g. pls/plz, o rly? (ya rly), oh noez, kthxbye)
- Actions surrounded by asterisks (I can't demonstrate it here because of SH's dumb HTML markup feature)
- Simple Japanese-style emoticons (upright as opposed to sideways) that can easily be typed on an English keyboard without having to copypaste anything (e.g. ^^ , o_O , -- , T_T, ;; )
And so on. To be clear, leetspeak is not to be confused with "textspeak", which was the abbreviation and initialisation of almost every commonly used word and phrase to avoid going over the 160 character limit of SMS and save time entering it in (e.g. wubu2 klkl gd thx brb, lol u tk him 2da bar|? jfc fu2 tbh ttyl). It also became popular on instant messaging, and was widely derided and despised on most online messageboards - including 4chan. It's also not to be confused with gaia/myspace/bebo/"it's 2006 and a 13yo girl has just discovered the internet" faggotry that ruined the internet (e.g. :3 omgggg sooo randumz <3, lolz dat ish sOOOO kawaii!!! ^___^). It's also not to be confused with 4chan's homegrown (or inherited from SA) lingo and catchphrases - however, leetspeak was frequently used for comic effect during the early years, at least until around 2006-2007 when the influx of actual retards (such as the textspeakers and gaiafags/myspace teens described above) saw everyone having fun pretending to be retarded, and mistakenly believed they were in good company. It was at that point that it stopped being funny, and there was eventually a large backlash against it all (see: no fun allowed). Most of all, it's DEFINITELY not to be confused with that fucking "doremi speak" that the underageb& from /s4s/ use, which is as obnoxious as it is new (e.g lole cude, i tibe lyg i hab a colde an cannod spele an aslo i hab downe snyedrom, halb me fren). That shit is made of brain tumors - please for the love of god stop posting that garbage, especially here. If you struggle to tell the difference between leetspeak and "doremi speak", just remember that in most cases, the former retains the correct phonetic pronunciation despite any changes in spelling, while the latter changes the pronunciation entirely and makes the reader sound like they have a serious speech impediment and/or mental disorder if they were to read it aloud. Nobody with the right number of chromosomes wants to read that shit. As a final note, while many of us used (or still use) classic leetspeak rampantly, most of us knew how to type properly when we needed to. The humor is lost when it's coming from the kinds of genuine retards who aren't just pretending, or who can't post without roleplaying as a mentally handicapped child. Don't be one of those faggots - l33tsp33k r3sp0nsibly!!!11 |
