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September 2, 2005

Strange But True!

Q. If you don't know about "leetspeek" you're probably not "speekin'" it. Who is, and what's the point of 133t5p33k, aka !337$p34k?

A. For starts, it's found in IM, chat, Usenet, but not the Web, says University of Michigan linguist John Lawler. It's a nonce phenomenon, like jazz or rap, but it isn't spoken: The "speek" part is a joke. It's strictly written, a way of using ASCII characters — the ones found on every keyboard — to sound out words and make up abbreviations, such as "133t5p33k" (elite speech) where 1 stands for L, 3 for E,


 
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