A friend of mine sent me a link via email the other day, instructing me to go check out a particular site, saying “This is leet.” He was using “leet” ironically, and I realized this, but I was bored and though I already knew what the term meant thanks to a story written by another friend, I decided to look up the term on Wikipedia. I figured there’d be a short description of the term and a brief history of it. But what I found instead was one of the longest, most comprehensive entries I’ve ever stumbled across in the ‘pedia. The leet entry begins thusly:

Leet (most commonly 1337 but often also leetspeak, l33t5p34k, 133t, or l33t) from the phonetic form of the word “elite”, is a cipher, or novel form of English spelling. It is characterized by the use of non-alphabetic characters to stand for letters bearing a superficial resemblance, and by a number of spelling changes such as the substitution of “z” for final “s” and “x” for “(c)k” or “(c)ks.” Leetspeak was first traditionally used on bulletin board systems and then later adopted by America Online users and other Internet communities.

However, leetspeak is not popular amongst all hackers, and nowadays is most commonly used in an ironic manner to represent immaturity. Many consider it a pointless affectation, and as it has become widely used it is less useful as a way of showing membership of an “elite” group. It is nonetheless a cultural phenomenon well-known amongst hackers and many other Internet users. [more…]

In response to this phenomenon (or plague, depending on how you look at it), is The Anti-1337 Manifesto:

Over the years, I have had to put up with people in chatrooms, posters on message boards, people on instant messengers, even people at my school, using 1337 in their everyday lives. It is permeating every branch of society. It is giving our great American nation (and every other nation with 31337ists) a bad name. I have put up with it long enough, and now it’s time to take a stand. Someone must bring the horrors of 1337 and 31337ists to light. That someone is me. [more…]