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February 25, 2005
Net prose and 'Leetspeek'
The internet is stimulating the development of language - on the whole - that seems to be the general drift of an article in Wired News. More people are writing than ever before - which is good. On the other hand we have a lot of abbreviations - and emoticons!
I have always hated the banality of emoticons. I remember having an angry debate about them on a BBS in Tokyo in the mid 1990s. But they are still with us, I suppose they remain a novelty for each new sub-generation of internet newbies.
The Wired News article references a fascinating Microsoft page about the subtleties of ‘Leetspeek’ (Elite Speak or ‘133t5p33k’) online slang, explaining how to translate words like ‘h4x’, and ‘d00d’ (hacks, dude). Being Microsoft the information is of course not for fun, but for spying on your children!
www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66671,00.html/wn_ascii
/www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidtalk.mspx
Posted by Simon Holledge at February 25, 2005 12:10 AM
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Comments
Google have had a "Hacker" 31337 speak language option for a couple of years now:
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/
Posted by: Watching Them, Watching Us at February 25, 2005 12:21 AM