As irritating as it is, I’ve come to realize that so-called “leet speak” is a fairly fascinating phenomenon. If I were going into linguistics, it would be the subject of my master’s thesis. It’s an art of visual puns, taking familiar patterns that we recognize as letters and sounds and twists them, breaks them apart, abstracts them away from the litteral (as it were). It’s an experiment in the boundaries of recognition and comprehension. It’s all the more fascinating that this profound project is being taken on by people who are not, it seems, particularly bright. It highlights something fundamental to the way the linguistics functions of our brain put things together. Linguists would be quite remiss not to start logging chatroom conversations.
Here’s a partial alphabet from examples of `leet’ that I’ve actually seen:
The `Leet’ alphabet
A 4 @
B 8
C ( ©
D /)
E 3
F /= ph
G 9
H |-| /-
I / !
J
K /{ /<
L l / /_
M //
N || //
O 0
P Þ
Ph F
Q
R ®
S z $ 5
T 7
U J (_)
V /
W //
X ><
Y
Z