1337

I came to 1337 (pronounced "leet") late.

1337 is an orthography (a "sociolect variety" or a cipher or a language, according to wikipedia) invented and used by online gamers and computer hackers in the early days of computers that has been expanding and evolving ever since. I call it an orthography because, although it has certain words and affixes that don't exist in standard English, English leetspeak (note that leet can be used to modify many languages and is not just an English phenomenon) largely sticks to English grammar but betrays its alphabet by replacing letters with numbers, symbols, and keyboard functions. 1337 or l33t, is an example; so is: 7h3 qµ1(|{ br0wn ƒ0x jµmp$ 0v3r 7h3 £42¥ Ð09.

Leet (short for "elite") seems to have evolved in part because of the difficulty of typing quickly on early machines and the need for a shorthand, but also because of the desire for a mode of communication exclusive to hackers and gamers, which would sift out the truly devoted from the mere dabblers. It is also used in order to evade online software that limits certain content from discussion boards, filters spam, or prevents the selling of pirated material.

Leet is a product of the relentless evolutionary pressure the internet exerts on language, as emails, instant messages, and chatrooms breed written words: spellings mutate, slang is passed down from blogger to reader, and new species of sentence are born. This evolution both brings us together and is a symptom of our togetherness. Leet changes quickly, is highly unstable, and yet remains readable. In part because it looks like English, in part because it is being developed in communal spaces by many minds at once.

What I find most interesting about leet are the challenges it poses to our conception of the alphabet. In leet, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a symbol and the platonic idea of a letter, ie, many characters can be used to indicate the same "letter" and vice versa: I, i, l, 1, 7, /, and ! are essentially interchangeable as more or less narrow, vertical beings.

Even more interesting is the fact that in leet, the method of producing a given character often comes to represent the character itself. For example, on a keyboard, an exclamation point is produced by pressing the "shift" key at the same time as the number "1" key. When a user wants to communicate excitement using many exclamation points, the string often looks like this: "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11" because, in their excitement, they fail to hold the shift key down as long as is necessary. This typo has now been incorporated into leet. Not only do users intentionally type "!!!!!11!!!!1!1!!!!!," an intention that is hard to discern from the original accidental production, but also: "!!!!!!!one!!!!!!!!eleven!!!!!!!!!!oneone!!!," or even: "!!!!!!!!!!one!!!!!!shift+1."

These permutations draw attention to a user's knowledge of common typing patterns and establish her as an elite hacker. They're more than a little snarky. However, they also highlight the fluidity of signs and the performative possibilities of written language. Using the signifier "!" to indicate excitement is standard; typing "!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!11!!!" unintentionally is a performance of excitement; typing "!!!!!!111!!!!!one!!!!!!!!eleven" is a mime of that performed excitement. The mime adds layers of meaning to the original sign, indicating a user's participation in a given community, referencing the emotions and behaviors (excitement, carelessness) of other members of that community, and revealing the mechanics of the production of the sign itself.

When the way you create a sign comes to stand in for the sign itself, it becomes a meta-sign, signifying both the original meaning of the sign and the bare fact of the sign, the fact of the signer. Really, it's quite exciting.

I went to college with an individual named Craig Plunges. He was an English major, interested especially in contemporary poetry, and quite tall.

I bring this individual to your attention because of the remarkble fact that his name is both a proper noun and a full sentence. What if your name were "Bobby Goes to the Store"? Or "It Rains"? In his natural state he's both grammatically correct and ambiguous -- either a name or a sentence; however, once you try to add him to a sentence, you have to decide which is which. Either, "Craig Plunges is coming over" (name) or "Craig plunges for a living" (sentence).

I once worked briefly with someone whose full name, though not spelled this way, was pronounced "On the Loo," but that's just a prepositional phrase and so not at all in the same league.

My own last name is an adverbial phrase, though I assume by accident. "Schön" in German means pretty or beautiful, and if you drop the umlaut in English, you're supposed to add an "e" -- schoen. But "schon" means "already," so my last name -- Schonberg -- now means "already mountain," which doesn't mean much, as far as I can tell. Not only am I far from sentencehood, but the pieces of name I do have can't even be cobbled into recognizable phrases, a sorry state of affairs. Perhaps if my middle name were "is"...

The Corrections

I definitely made up the word "declent." It should be "decline," as observed by astute reader, Liztraut. I'm feeling quite foolish right now. Thank you Mz. Traut, wherever you are.

"She likes her hair to be real orange / she uses tangerines" - The Flaming Lips

An orange is orange and that's what makes the word orange into not just a fruit or a color but a state of being: the state of being in which you feel no disjunction between what you are and what you're called, the state of filling your name completely, perfectly, so that no gaps of doubt, of "what if I were..." or "will I ever be...," remain. Who is lucky enough to count their name as an objective and recognizable condition? Even those whose names have other meanings -- Grace, Claire, Auburn. Can they claim to be contained within those words and can those words claim to be satisfied by them?

An orange is orange. And that's what I envy.

Translator, Adulterer

I used to wonder whenever I met couples what they were like when they were alone. I assumed they behaved differently alone together, that they shared a secret private life, a life of shorthand references to oft-mentioned stories and of solid, true explorations of whatever was most important to them, whatever defined them. I used to wonder what they saw when they looked at each other's faces, what they understood in the cadences of one another's voices, what meaning each of them bore for the other in their material details alone. I was fascinated by this projection of the intimacy between them and by the fact that although I could see them, I would never see them as they saw each other.

There is, however, no intimacy to rival that between a speaker and her native language. Sometimes I imagine English fitting me as skin, not just covering me but holding the spilling and glistening parts of me together, making a solid out of so much liquid and slime. Other times, I picture English as a liquid or gas itself, a lake, the air of a city. Too, I like the image of a small, curled thing, a kitten or a bird, snuggled within me, wrapped tight against the curve of my skull. Closer than any confidant is what makes confidences possible, and lying closer to me than anything else is English.

This is not to say that I feel affection for English itself; rather, that English is inseparable from what I experience, constituent in all my evaluation, interaction, emotion. And so none of these spatial metaphors really works: English is not a reed I whistle through, not a being within me, nor a layer around me. I don't know how to figure it, exactly, except to say that its sounds transcend sound. I cannot peel the words back.

If this intimacy exists between each speaker and her language, then learning a foreign language is the closest we ever come to being inside someone else's head. When first introduced to us, a new word has no meaning, seems random: why should "langweilig" mean "boring" or "marrant," "funny"? They shouldn't for any particular reason, and the first time we hear them, they don't. A new language is a mess of sounds that we have no particular attachment to. But with enough repetition, those sounds become words and those words become...objects, states, causes, effects, loved ones, lost ones, memories, stories, desires: the trail of our fluency.

In those moments when we start to hear a foreign word as a meaning but still remember when it was just a sound, when we speak a language proficiently but not instinctively, it is as if we are entering someone else's mind but without having to leave our own. We feel what it might mean to be a French or German or Arabic or Japanese speaker but we feel too a certain thrill that no native speaker feels. We have broken out of ourselves. Suddenly, the features that seemed so foreign are suffused with a familiar blush.

Put another way, learning to speak another's language is like sleeping with someone else's lover.

Now I Lay Me

In English, "lie" is a present tense intransitive verb. That means that things can lie or lie down, but they can't lie something else down. You have to lay something (or someone) else. "Lay" is a transitive verb. Not so bad.

The past tense of "lie," however, is "lay," as in: "I lay down in the barn but could not sleep for all the mooing."

The past tense of "lay" is "laid."

So I laid a blanket over all the cows. That shut them up.

This distinction may seem not only arbitrary but wilfully confusing; it's certainly going out of fashion. But I was comforted to learn today that the confusion is not native to English, but inherited almost directly from German. It's their arbitrariness and illogic, not ours.

In German, "liegen" is the intransitive and "legen" (pronounced LAY-gun) is the transitive. The past tense of liegen is "gelegen" (guh-LAY-gun) and the past tense of legen, "gelegt." Somehow, everything makes sense when you can blame its nonsense on someone else.