Greywolf, veterano de a.h.w.w.

13375p33k = (4|\| 1 |-|4\/3 4 (|-|3353|.(_)|?&3|? ?
lolspeak = i can has cheezburger?

someone also said something along the lines of “in the 90’s, before we had leetspeek”

i am surprised nobody has pointed out this blatant misconception yet O.o maybe should spend more time at lolgeeks.com

i guess the mid 90s, the time when AOL began to rise into power on the internet, would be the time when the average joe would have access to internet slang concepts. i remember my family’s computer having a flip-page thing stuck to the side of it with a list of internet abbreviations such as “LOL” “BRB” “TTYL” etc.

1337 has been around since the mid 80’s, however, when people would misspell things over bbs using ascii characters as replacement. this would put them “in tune” with the “computer geek” subculture, and prove that they were PRETTY GOOD WITH COMPUTAZ and could feel cool about themselves for their secret society <3. tbh “lol” is not leetspeak, neither is “afk” “bbl” “brb” or any of the many other popular abbreviations and acronyms.

if you read Wikipedia and use that as your only basis of knowledge, you will see that open-source users group stuff like “lol” in with the evolution of leetspeak. now that the borders are merging in the 2k’s, we get things like w00t being added to webster’s dictionary and lulz on the news.

31337 h4×0rz, and regular users, now blend 1337 with other varieties of internet slang, for an awesome flavor of internet subculture that anybody can try to replicate, but few, imho, can ever actually be good at.

you fialed to point out that half the lol in lolcat speak is seeing a few words in a whole sentence misspelled. not the whole sentence. that just maeks you look like a noob who (after all these years!) no longer has to disguise the fact that you are totally illiterate.

in a similar group, also forgotten to mention in this article, are false tags and commands like /headdesk and wow it was so inclusive of all the internet subcultures, and clearly shows how everything is going to merge into one

7|-|4|\||<5 |=012 4 (00|_ 41271(|_3 4|\|¥\|/4′/!1!111one

mebbe iz teh rong butt ai leiks anyways

(Cumree am bithh!!)

The famous “Hello World” Program
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYE

who actually read all that and understood every single paragraph? Honestly??
in general, thats pretty damn interesting, but confusing at times :S

BTW, 1984 = g00d book, short title.

Internetspeak (my term for chatspeak/leetspeak/macros, etc.) is not a bad thing right now, because it is expressed by people who can read and write English perfectly. It’s just a big fun inside joke that I myself enjoy, and that expands every day to include more cultures and meanings. The problem, and what really gets me worried, is that generations from now, internetspeak will become so ubiquitous that people start _thinking_ in it. Already, I often skim around long paragraphs or think “tl;dr” when I’m reading on the internet, and I avoid chatspeak like the plague. Since most modern Americans read things on the internet fifteen times more than they read things at the library, young kids are exposed to a lot more chatspeak than full English sentences. Right now leetspeak is written by people who are intelligent and can write in proper English, but choose not to. Eventually, that might not be the case. If Americans don’t read more, than internetspeak may become the common parlance.

Of course, I’m *not* suggesting that leetspeak is just like newspeak. Newspeak is a way to enforce totalitarian thinking, and leetspeak is a way to enforce inside jokes about cats in unusual and amusing positions. Also, newspeak limits the number of words, while leetspeak vocabulary grows by leaps and bounds (think of how invisible ___ lead to visible ___) and encourages imaginative spelling. I’m just saying that that both ’speaks have something in common, and that if reading internetspeak replaces reading full English, then people won’t be able to express themselves in full sentences that require long periods of sustained thought. Once you can’t express something, it becomes much, much harder to think it.

Woofspeak was typified by mangled doggy grammar and spelling (hard to type with paws), and the postings were usually given a subject heading that was prefixed with ‘woof’ (or less commonly ‘woofchat’), making them easy to search out even now. Dogs seemed rather more enthusiastic about everything than cats appear to be, with the exception of “poly ticks” and being called a “baddog”, and were generally tolerant of their “hoomins” even if they didn’t understand us much.

I haven’t read woof in years, and those of my dogs that participated are no longer living, however to this day their email addresses still receive spam. Personally, I always felt it was a little cruel of spammers to send spam about enlarging the male anatomy to a dog that was missing his bits!

ennyfing else?

doan be sad, fynd wot maek yu happi. mae ai sujess: (1) kittehs (2) cheezbergerz

Dis site rox@!

ai wit yoo on dat postrofee ting. ai cans has reel fit ovar dat, tooo. nawt gud fur brane funcshun.

germinate sound like da wun gai waitin 4 everbuddy to die an he wantz to watches it happen cause he hate everbuddy so murtch… pritty sad…

mebbe we hasnt found da cure 4 mortiliteh. we all cross da bridj. butt we duznt has 2 b miserabel wile we down heer!!!

hug for teho {{hug}}
hug for germinate {{hug}}

nobuddy rites like chauser cause dat wuz a long time agoes. in fifty yeers, nobuddy gonna rite like dis. will bee diffrent. life marches on an as it marches, it changes. uvverwise, no prgress.

In other words, will analysis substantially affect development of language structure in Internet slanguage; will language spread be limited by speed of evolution (outlying areas learning it at the same time initiating areas have evolved to unrecognizable forms), and what hope have older lifeforms in bridgeing the communication (and spelling) gap?

CS

thus:

“Yo esta en soo ‘rador, comendendo sus comeedos”

Text messaging on cellphones also contributes heavily to leetspeak, with its ‘hw r u?’ and ‘wht u doing?’ ; abbreviated to save both tiny multiple keystrokes on a number pad, time and possible fees. Txt messaging then influences instant chat programs like Aim and Yahoo messenger so that people are typing on fullsize keyboards the same way. And add to that, ventrilo and teamspeak, ‘voice over IP applications’ used for gaming where microsoft sam (computerized voice of those applications) actually pronounces lol as ‘lawl’, thus bringing in another influence, so that when talking over these gaming voice applications, leetspeak has a basis for pronuniciations.

I figure that I’m going to be ahead communicating with my grandson, who is now 6 years old. Nobody writes like Chaucer today, and we’re not going to be writing like Melville tomorrow, that’s apparent.