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.