If I communicate online with anyone under the age of 25, I’m confronted by words and phrases that mean nothing to me. N00b? OMG? What’s going on?

This question prompted Michael Jerome to email in immediately. “|\/|0$7 p3op13,” he painstakingly wrote, “\/\/1|_ |_ B3 (_)|\|4B|_3 70 R34D S3|\|73|\|(3$ L11k T|-|3s3.” I couldn’t agree more, Michael. The impenetrable cipher of Leet (short for elite, and more commonly written as L33t, or, at its most obtuse, 31337) is the online code that teenagers lapse into as soon as they want to confuse and irritate anyone outside their peer group. To the uninitiated, Michael’s sentence is a string of meaningless drivel, but it actually reads “most people will be unable to read sentences like these”. Any attempt to explain L33t will inevitably make me feel extremely old and look like an idiot, but here goes.

Its origins began in the world of online hacking and software piracy. By substituting numbers and symbols for the letters they resemble, hackers could use phrases that might be banned on the messageboards they communicated on, so, for example, “porn” became “p0rn”, and, as the messageboard admins wised up, became “pr0n”. L33t is littered with these misspellings, along with acronyms, transposed letters and dubious grammar in order to render it as meaningless as possible to anyone stumbling across it. The actual language used tends to be derived from online gaming scenarios, where, according to reader Emma Brett, “achieving the objective of blasting your opponent to pieces will provoke the exclamation ‘OMG i pwnd j00 n00b!’” (Translation: Good heavens, I beat you comprehensively at a game that you are obviously unfamiliar with.)

The older internet user, in a misguided attempt to learn more, might turn to an online L33t lexicon, or Microsoft’s wonderfully naïve “Parent’s primer to computer slang”, or perhaps the humourless analysis of Wikipedia, e.g. “’Teh’ is sometimes used in front of a verb in a novel form of gerund. Thus, ‘this sucks’ becomes ‘this is teh suck’, or, declinated further, ‘teh suXX0rs’”. Google, being slightly more with-it, have thoughfully placed a L33t search engine online at www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker. The kids who actually use L33t, of course, laugh themselves silly at these attempts to use it; it owes its very development to umpteen layers of irony, humour and sarcasm, and any L33t-speak you encounter should be imagined as being delivered by a sneering, contemptuous youth to get the full effect. Meanwhile, new and increasingly impenetrable variants will continue to appear in order to, well, pwn n00bs – or, if you prefer, make the rest of us feel stupid. Of course, there is a serious side to the subject of L33t. Not really! LOL! PWND!!111 U r teh suXX0r! I need a lie down.