Yeah, those who dont make a habit of this. ? that was really hard to read and I bet harder to type.
Exactly. Takes some intelligence to process all that if you don’t see it very often. 
This thread is TEH SUXORS ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H TEH WIN!
Really though I have always wanted to know where “teh sexah” came from. I always assumed it was a something awful dumb post that got immortalized by mockery. “teh” is a pretty common typo like !!!11 but what the hell is sexah? From context it’s sexy but what is the origin of that wacko spelling?
There was a time when this sort of thing was the trademark of B1FF!!!1!!1, who probably never existed. L337 seems to be a pretty direct descendant of B1FFspeak, but broader and more consistently applied. “Elite” is the way to pronounce it, yes.
It’s only taken to extremes in playfulness; more typically, a single person makes the same character/phonetic substitutions regularly. There’s some variation among individuals, and especially between groups of individuals, but AFAIK no geographic variation (except for root-language variation, if any).
I’d call it a dialect, but I’m not a linguist even in my imagination, so no doubt my definition of the term is pretty loose.
(Another interesting thing about L337 is the alteration of curses, developed to get around server restrictions. B1ZZN4ch, 5h1zn17, and creative variations are pretty common.)
For more about B1FF!!1!, dig out your New_Hacker’s_Dictionary or find a copy of the infamous Jargon File.