Destabilization, Derivation, and Hierarchy: A Linguistic Analysis of NetSpeak Memes

by David Ruby. Oxford UP: March 2008. 272 pages. $23.00.

(from the introduction)

...evolving internet language characterized by a struggle between multiplicity and virality, by which we mean that for one given term, there are many words/spellings, while at the same time a word's or concept's viability is derived from its ability to spread widely...

...like many cultural reappropriations, the originating group uses its nonstandard practices as a means of differentiating itself from the mainstream. In this regard it is analogous to what early hip-hop culture provided for inner city African American ghettoes: a nonstandard that intentionally designed to stand at odds with the mainstream. Other representations of similar phenomena include "krumping" (a dance style), pidgin languages...

...in chapter 4, we primarily focus on the internet language subculture of "leet" (also, "l33t" or "1337"), which illustrates this concept perfectly. The name of the sublanguage itself derives from internet bulletin boards of the 1980s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet), referring to individuals who had "elite" status to access certain material. Nevertheless, as soon as "leet" became widely understood, the very nature of the language forced it to become, as T.S. Eliot once said of modern poetry, "more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language to his meaning." Therefore, "leet" became "l33t" (a morphological replacement), then "1337," and then "10100111001" (binary form).

this is of course, what differentiates it from the preponderance of other internet speak, mostly based on internet abbreviations (imho, lmao, brb), or emoticons.

...of course leads us to speculation of why this internet subculture performs...

References
Crystal, David. Txting: the Gr8 Db8. Oxford UP: 2008.
http://www.amazon.com/Txtng-Gr8-Db8-David-Crystal/dp/0199544905

Product Description: "Text messaging has spread like wildfire. Indeed texting is so widespread that many parents, teachers, and media pundits have been outspoken in their criticism of it. Does texting spell the end of western civilization?
In this humorous, level-headed and insightful book, David Crystal argues that the panic over texting is misplaced. Crystal, a world renowned linguist and prolific author on the uses and abuses of English, here looks at every aspect of the phenomenon of text-messaging and considers its effects on literacy, language, and society. He explains how texting began, how it works, who uses it, and how much it is used, and he shows how to interpret the mixture of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay typically used in texting. He finds that the texting system of conveying sounds and concepts goes back a long way--to the very origins of writing. And far from hindering children's literacy, texting turns out to help it.
Illustrated with original art by Ed MacLachlan, a popular cartoonist whose work has appeared in Punch, Private Eye, New Statesman, and many other publications, Txting: The Gr8 Db8 is entertaining and instructive--reassuring for worried parents and teachers, illuminating for teenagers, and fascinating for everyone interested in what's currently happening to language and communication."