WSJ suXX0Rz*

This morning, Ried pointed me toward this Wall Street Journal article about "Leetspeak." WonderBlog has talked about this aspect of language before, once or twice, but I felt I needed to bring it up again because this article ticked me off.

First, there's the very fact that we're still talking about Leetspeak as if it's some brand new, under-the-radar phenomenon. While the actual words and trends have changed, the basic premise is the same.

Secondly, they link to this smaller article, which they have translated into some form of Leet. While I suppose that's fine for demonstration purposes, what irritates me here is that Leet is rarely, if ever, used for entire paragraphs. That's not the intention. Leet is appropriate when gaming, chatting, texting, mocking YouTube videos... that kind of thing, where you have a sentence or two to make a point.

Leet isn't a new way of writing old things (like interviews about Shakespeare)-- it's a way of writing new things. The technologies are new, and so are our ways of discussing them. That seems pretty natural to me. When you look at their huge chunks of letters (and substitutes for letters), of course it looks like intelligible crap. That's what it is. But in small doses it's almost a geek mating call.

The final thing that I want to mention is the very first line: "The Internet is threatening to change the way we speak." I'm awestruck and offended by this line. Of course it is. It's also "threatening" to change to way we pay bills online, and it's "threatening" to change the way we shop, communicate, study, etc. The word "threatening" in that line is inane, and the more we think in terms of "oh gawd, that's happening to our clean little language," the closer we get to moving backwards.

*No one uses suXX0rz anymore.