1337 vocabulary

As part of research for this novel, I'm going to have to force myself to become an expert on 1337 talk.

Here's the trusty wikipedia entry, and here's a short dictionary of l33t terms and phonology

I'm an armchair linguist, which means I don't know anything about linguology (or linguini, for that matter), but I like to imagine that we can understand something about a culture by studying its language. Not in the sense that we can learn that Eskimos are obsessed with snow because they have 7 words for the stuff (that's actually the language just reflecting the environment). But if l33t has words like haxx0r (top dog)and n00b and llama (people who are not in the l33t know) and all variations of pwn3d (to "school" someone, or to put more bluntly, to screw someone over), it seems to me that the 1337 language betrays a highly hierarchical structure where social dominance plays a big role.

That sounds sort of like a Cesar Millan episode. But it also sounds a lot like a video game.

The aesthetic challenge in writing a novel using l33t would necessarily be to make it authentic to the gaming community while also making it intelligible to the n00b reader.

Emphasis
1337 is structured by hierarchical worthiness -- the more sophisticated one's ability to alter the orthography of a message, the more weight it carries. From wikipedia: In particular, speakers of Leet are fond of verbing nouns, turning verbs into nouns (and back again) as forms of emphasis, e.g. "Austin rocks" is weaker than "Austin roxxorz" (note spelling), which is weaker than "Au5t1N is t3h r0xx0rz" (note grammar), which is weaker than something like "0MFG D00D /\Ü571N 15 T3H l_l83Я 1337 Я0XX0ЯZ".

Esoterica & crypticism
1337 is all about being exclusive. Once the representation of a word becomes well know, leetspeakers feel compelled to find a way to reappropriate their language. From wikipedia: The term leet itself is often written 31337, or 1337, and many other variations. After the meaning of these became widely familiar, 10100111001 came to be used in its place, because it is the binary form of 1337, making it more of a puzzle to interpret.^[9]

Deliberate rule-breaking
From wikipedia: An increasingly common characteristic of Leet is changing its grammatical usage to be deliberately incorrect. The widespread popularity of deliberate misspelling is similar to the cult following of the "All your base are belong to us" phrase.

Script kiddies
Megatokyo
Ventrilo
Mods
j00
7456: In Mandarin, 7456 (qī sì wǔ liù) sounds marginally like 气死我了　(qì-sǐ wǒ -le, "to make me angry," "to piss me off"), and is sometimes used in internet slang.^[4]