On the origins of speaking...

Does anyone out there remember 1337? Anyone? No? Okay, time for yet another edition of "linguistic historical primers"! Yay!

So, waayyy back in the day, there was this newfangled method of connecting one computer to another, called the "internet". Now, I'm taking you so far back, that at this time, the internet was not yet advanced enough for porn. (At least, no pictures; I'm sure there were some dirty stories floating around). The fearless nerds who traversed this untamed frontier started to develop their own language, designed to be incomprehensible to anyone who did not spend great amounts of time thinking about how some keyboard characters looked like other keyboard characters. (For instance, the number 58008 looks like the word "boobs" when you put it on a calculator and turn it upside down.) This language came to be known as "leet/1337", since only the "elite" computer nerds understood it. After about six months or so of putting up with this nonsense, it fell out of style, and the true mark of the "elite" became: proper use of English while on the internet. Who'da thunk it?

Now, of course, the internet and its subsidiaries are available so widely that you are considered a nerd if you don't send text messages via cell phone while IMing all your bbf's on AOL. This, in turn, has spawned a whole new form of "leet", known to CNN.com as "text-speak". Oh, those crazy New Zealanders. Land of Xena and Frodo, you have officially earned the respect and love of nerds world-wide. Well done.