Talk:Leet/Archive 1

message: Since the inception of "leet" it has always refered to itelf as l33t... not 1337. I do not know why, but that's the way it is. If someone would please take the time to replace the "1337s" with the correct spelling "l33t" (L 3 3 T), that would be appriciated.
-Masterpsyker 08:42, 30 December 2005 (EST)
Please Cite your sources --Slashme 11:41, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting one. Can published works of games journalism (PC Zone Magazine) be classed as authorities on such things? If it's worth anything I personally understand Masterpsyker to be correct. -- Stealthychimp 19:23, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I wouldn't consider them to be authorities, having been an editor and writer for one such publication (Strategy Player Magazine). Usually the experts in a genre are well known. Swatjester 11:34, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

text: "leet" is a genre? I think the article is fine the way it is. And, I can personally say I was using bulletin boards, where such talk was bandied about back in 1989. There are far too many variations to say that one is correct and another isn't. I can't see any reason to change it. Avriette 16:58, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Correct spelling of "leet"

message: This should really be in the pwn article.  It's only of tangential relevance to 1337. --Slashme 07:25, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Cans of Pwnage

message: Anyone else think the bulk of teh ought to be moved here, and the rest to Wiktionary?
:teh is culturally distinct from l33t, at least as I understand it.  It doesn't date to the 1980s or early 1990s, and is used by a different group of people. --Delirium 18:25, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)
:: There's a cultural continuum. Your statement also applies to many things used in here, and "leet" itself isn't defined as being from the 1980s/1990s, it's evolving continuously. --Random|832 11:35, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Teh 

message: The only time I've seen leet used other than by patent idiots or ironically was in warez boast files.
It fits with hackerish keystroke saving, trying to fit boast messages into non-relocatable code, and trying to find alternative spellings for one's handle that aren't already taken on BBS.  Perhaps someone (somefew) can provide a definitive history from archived files.  ISTR a few samples in early 2600's but again, mostly ironic. Rich Farmbrough 21:43, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  History 

message: Noob != Nobody.
Unless the usage has really changed, which is concievable, but I think is HIGHLY unlikely. Proof? Until I get such, I'm going to say that this is someone trying to introduce a new concept, not show an existing concept
(reminder -- Wikipedia is not a place for original research)
: No, sorry, but n00b realy does mean inexperienced. It's an insult used on forums (vBBs), IRC and especially online gaming. In a game if you call someone a n00b, noob, newb or newbie, they are usually on your team, and have exhibited lack of experience. For example, if you and I are in a game, on the same team, and you team-kill me (TK, Friendly Fire), I would call you a n00b and you would be duly offended. Poorsod 11:22, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  n00b . again 

message: I've noticed that hax0r can be pronounced both hacker and hacksor. I'm just wondering if the 'e' and 'o' sounds can be interpolated to prononce hax0r with an 'Œ' sound (in the German language, 'Œ' is written 'Ö', and in some Scandinavian languages, 'Œ' is written 'Ø') so that it is pronounced 'hackœr'.
In old in old-style ASCII graphic character sets, '0' is displayed with a slash through it (this is known as a slashed zero). This slashed zero looks the same as the 'Ø' in some Scandinavian languages which is pronounced 'Œ'. So I'm wondering whether this is coincidental, or if whoever invented 'x0r' was aware that it would look like 'hackør'.
I've not been able to find anything to back up my claim, and it is just a theory, but I have heard someone (who can be considered a hax0r) pronounce 'hax0r' as 'hackœr' (although they did speak in a Northern English accent).
Ae-a 08:43, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronounciation of '0' in 'x0r' as '&OElig;' 

message: I'm only going by my own anecdotal evidence, but some one here had brought up the Journey album cover of "Escape" ( E5C4P3 ), which was a very popular cultural reference in the early eighties. That album was released, I think, in late 1981. It sold quite well (and still sells).
I would plead its case as a remote cousin, maybe not a direct precursor of Leet, but being an example of using existing typography to "generate" a synthetic typeface from an existing one. While the group Journey had no need to do so except as artistic statement, I do believe its example was POSSIBLY picked up by numerous computer users who felt a need to "escape" the strictures of ASCII-only "straight" text. I also believe the lineprinter-based "ASCII Art" which depicted Snoopy, Neil Armstrong and so many pinups inspired careful use of the set of displayable characters to "substitute" for the angles, curves and shapes of typography-- hence the more arcane examples of leet you cite late in the article.
In the early "BBS" days, when ASCII was, more often than not, displayed variously on terminals and tv screens in some crude font generic to the display device, there were no universally-adopted ANSI bold/dim, underline, italic, color or other attributes to rely upon; similarly, no set of typefaces like Times or Trebuchet to select from (the fanciest terminals could do these, but nothing but the ASCII characters themselves would make it between users of the BBS system. Indeed, individual communites often had "formatting commands" relevant to the BBS software being run, so you had to be aware of the potential effect of certain character combinations. (Hey, even Wiki has these!)
So your choices of emphasis in writing a missive to friends mostly were:
 1. CAPS {often referred to as "shouting"},
 2. lowercase,
 3. **punctuation**,
 4.  +============+
     | separation |
     +============+
 5. W H I T E S P A C I N G.
Now, to an extent, there is still some use to be had of these tricks, as "board" software and blog servers sometimes deliberately restrict use of attributes to a small subset of what a user might otherwise embed into a web entry, supposedly to prevent someone from running amuck with HTML and blowing the page into the undisplayable zone. But in the early eighties, you could pretty much assume that whatever was displayed to you or what you could display to others was essentially ONLY what you could type on a Selectric with one available ball. (Of coincidence only: the most popular Selectric ball was called "Elite".)
Other restrictions of computer-communication peculiar to that time were also important: logon names were often limited to eight or so characters, sometimes only rendered in caps, and often no spaces or "normal" punctuation beyond dash or underscore (',/?:;"'\|+={}[]) were allowed in their construction. So, like auto license vanity plates, sometimes you had to be creative to get a logon name that suited. Since real names were an impediment anyway to striking a pose or character of choice, thanks to the anonymity of the modem, users often relied on expressions drawn from fantasy or culture: Bilbo, Falcon, JREwing, paladin-- rather than John Smith, Jenny Brill, etc.
In pre-www(!) days, a collection of LOTS of local and some national BBS services were still far more accessible to the nascent "surfer" generation than the actual internet. ISPs were few and tended to be expensive except in business and grad-level scholastic contexts. An example of a service which attempted to bring the BBS world to "all of us" was U.S. Videotel, which sold a cute little black-and-white video terminal with a built-in modem that dialled directly to the server farm they ran. I am told that this was an attempt to bring the technology of the french post-office-run Minitel network to American consumers. It worked, for a few years, until the Internet and Internet-proxy providers like AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy changed the economics of building a user community and USVideotel folded. It was at USVideotel in 1984 that I first ran into extensive use of StUdLyCaPs by the users-- which I thought were really annoying. (I still do.)
AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, the Source; initially these were, as you'll remember, time-based services. Ten minutes on one, you'd have just spent a buck. The initial come-ons of 50 free hours would expire about the time you had got the hang of the place; then you would begin to realize just how much of a communication junkie you were becoming. Needless to say, Terseness  was a virtuous style to adopt.
For those of us with our own computers and terminals and modems, even 300-baud ones, membership in local BBSes was a better deal. Some were even free! Unlike the internet user, who was online with others interacting, most local BBSes were telephonically bound to one user at a time. So you'd log on, get an hour to read and send mail, look at the chess game, make a move, then get logged off when your time expired. So you'd dial another local BBS and hang out there, checking out the messages left since the last time you were there... all like a bumblebee making the rounds and cross-pollenating as you went!
Local BBSes which had interactivity were rare, but available: they tended to be monthly membership-based (to pay for the multiple phone lines into them). This brought about the first "chat rooms". People would drift in and out of them, limited only by the ultimate number of phone lines of the board. One I was a member of ultimately had 72 lines; it was often quite a party there.
Oh, the Journey connection:
Album cover art in general tended to have a more pronounced influence on style back in the days when it was reproduced in the jumbo-size, for LP slipcases. Printed fullscale and wholesale on teeshirts and posters and mirror tiles and surfboards, most rock aficianados knew the covers on sight, even if they'd never listen to the whole record. Modern CD covers do not carry similar totemic power-- they are simply too small to serve as really accessible "art". But the cover of Journey's "Escape" album certainly was one of rock's more identifiable icons of the early eighties.
I remember friends specifically commenting to me on the typographical amusement of E5C4P3 on the cover-- it striking them as a novelty. Though I didn't particularly care about Journey at the time (I find them much better now on the radio than I did then), I had to admire the beautifully-executed cover art and the clever "pun" on fantasy starships and their usually-depicted  nomenclature conventions.
I myself was to experiment with this "innovation" on my own keyboard, only to conclude it was not very easy to express anything very useful or accessible-- I decided it was futile and looked like a faulty disk-drive sector had mangled my text.
But I did have to try it-- just as someone else I saw had worked up a tagline using ASCII in another "abnormal" way: "umop apisdn w,i aw dlaH". Stupid ASCII tricks?
Maybe. How you get from there to "suxxors" or "w00t" I do not know. Desire to be perceived as someone in that "elite" group has never possessed me. I've looked at the occasional word like "Pr0n" and wondered if my eyes were crossed. But I do believe that, even if the connection is not direct inspiration by the authors of Leet, an antecedent fossil, "prior art" if you will, IS still there in that Journey album cover.
Just my opinions. Thanks.
08057evalsyttik at oohay dot moc <<don't you just hate spam?>>
*Nicely put. So what do you say, folks? Tim Rhymeless  (Er...let's shimmy)  03:48, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reconsider the "Journey" connection 

message: Si "leet" really pronounced "elite", with the "e" sound at the start? I've always been pronouncing it "leet" without the initial "e" sound. I simply assumed it was a contracted form.  — JIP | Talk 8 July 2005 09:25 (UTC)
Elite --> 'lite --> leet --> 1337. So I'd pronounce it leet. Especially seeing as it is often written l33t. Poorsod 11:32, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation 

message: Has anyone heard of this term? "Oh my God, what the fuck, barbecue"?  — Rickyrab | Talk 02:14, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have heard of that term. It is meant to make fun of all those internet abbreviations that are common place among users of IM programs. It would belong on the Internet Slang page. --cheese-cube 02:12, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=omgwtfbbq  --PinchasC | £€åV€ m€ å m€§§åg€ 11:54, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes thats what I meant, only more coherently. --cheese-cube 04:58, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

text: The "BBQ" part is just an intensifier, I think. There's also "OMGWTFNIPPLE." It's probably just something that was made to make fun of n00bs trying to use as many acronyms as possible. Worldmaster0 15:01, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: OMGWTFBBQ

message: Is it possible that all these misspellings represent dyslexia more than anything? Perhaps many of the mosy enthusiastic users of l33t are also more likely to be dyslexic than the normal population. Dyslexic people may have trouble with sequencing, and typing characters in the wrong order is just another sign of that.
:"I'm not dyslexic, I'm l33t!--cheese-cube 03:44, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I must say that I disagree--I would imagine that 7331 er... 1337 would be more difficult for someone who was dyslexic because there are not only letters, but numbers as well. I could be wrong--I'm not dyslexic, but I've got a feeling that l33t really does have it's 'r00ts' in hacking, trying to get past language filters, and making fun of common misspellings. authraw 20:40, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Dyslexia and Frequent Misspellings in l33t