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“1337 for humans + easy password construction”...

“1337 for humans + easy password construction” #nerds #lang / SML.20130201.SC.Wikipedia.leet (Photo credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML)

I am thinking it is kind of like lerts. I can be alert.

The world needs more lerts.

But leets? Not so sure.

There are days when I think life has passed me by. The technological life that is.

I started my day today the way I often do … with a cup of hot coffee or tea (coffee today … with hazelnut sweetener and a shot of milk) Then I proceeded to do the morning checks.

Did anyone read my blog overnight? Any new likes or follows? Make a short entry in my private diary / blog. Check the latest headlines. Then I read my Facebook feed.

Techno-savvy I am not.

I do not do Twitter … I do not Tweet. I have heard that the pound sign, otherwise known as upper-case 3 on my keyboard, is now known as a hash tag. It signifies the topic of the tweet.

And if I understand correctly, I think that #out-of-touch-old-woman would probably need to show up somewhere in the 140 characters allowed per Tweet if I decided to Tweet for some reason.

I do have a Twitter account, but the folks I deal with a lot are lucky they use email.

I know emails should be a part of my first thing in the morning daily routine … and they used to always be in the background of my computer … but checking them has dropped to a secondary type of importance.

I do not use text messages on my cell phone. I am lucky I even use a cell phone.

There is no automatic data plan for a smart phone. My phone is not smart.

I’d say it was moderately functional … kind of the C student of cell phones and plans. I have a keypad that slides out with teeny tiny keys … but the only use of thumbs in my life has little to do with typing  … unless on a full sized keypad. So my cell phone plan with only 450 minutes a month is more than enough for me.

There is one person … okay, maybe two people … young enough to be enamored of texting who are in my life.

In this mega message short length world, I have learned that it has become necessary to come up with abbreviations. Space savers.

Except I do not use them. Not here, not anywhere. Okay, the occasional lol on a Facebook comment, but other than that …

So when I looked at my Facebook feed this morning I saw something that I did not understand. There was a comment from George Takei.  Yes … I may be a dinosaur, but I like George Takei on Facebook … along with 4 million others who like him.

He wrote something like “She was pwned … as they say.”

Pwned?

How do you pronounce that? Puwinned? Peewinned? Pwinned? Pawned? And more importantly what in the world did it mean?

So I Googled it. I do know how to use Search Engines, after all.

According to this Urban Dictionary, I learned:

A corruption of the word “Owned.”  This originated in an online game called Warcraft, where a map designer misspelled “owned.”  When the computer beat a player, it was supposed to say, so-and-so “has been owned.”Instead, it said, so-and-so “has been pwned.”It basically means “to own” or to be dominated by an opponent or situation, especially by some god-like or computer-like force.

Another reference described it as being like 1337.

1337?

More than 1336?

So I Googled 1337, only to learn that 1337 was geek-speak for LEET … where the 1 was an L, the 3’s were for E’s, and the 7 was for T.

Okay.

But what’s a LEET? Anything like a LEEK? I make great potato-leek soup.

Further reading from Wikipedia …

Leet (or “1337“), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is an alternative alphabet for the English language that is used primarily on the Internet. It uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. For example, leet spellings of the word leet include 1337 and l33t; eleet may be spelled 31337 or 3l33t.

The term leet is derived from the word elite.

Alright then. Elite. More?

Misspellings are now lolspeak, like teh instead of the. “We owned the other team.” is shortened to Woot … or w00t. Then there is the use of z instead of s … like skillz. Hmm. We have a store up here that does stuff like that … but it is all because of the owner’s name having a Z in it.

 They also went on to say “0MFG D00D /\Ü571N 15 T3H l_l83Я 1337 Я0XX0ЯZ”  stood for OMG, dude, Austin is the über-elite rocks-er!.

It was around then that my brain started to turn to mush and my eyes glazed over.

I was encouraged when the Urban Dictionary said:

When using leetspeak, you should be aware that you are almost definitely coming across as a moron.

Ought to be interesting to see what the spell check does to this blog entry.

Pwned, 1337, whatever. Thank goodness for \/\/ 1 |< 1 P 3 [) 1 4 (Wikipedia)

The world probably needs more leets, but I am not one.

I am now officially old.

But according to the Urban Dictionary I am not a moron.