The Times: Tech column - Elite-speak/E-mail scams
By David Rowan
TECHNOLOGICAL revolutions always leave their mark on the English language from the shorthand informality of text-messaging to colourful slang such as "spam" that finds its way into mainstream use. But if you want to stay a step ahead of the dictionaries and understand what the internet elite is saying today, your only option is to learn their language, "elite speak". I have spent the past week taking lessons from an expert - an experience that has left my eyes glazed over.
You will have encountered elite speak if you have ever seen pirated software advertised as "warez" or a hacked website described as "h4x0r3d". A combination of deliberate misspellings and creative abbreviations, this slang allows insiders to stay ahead of "newbies" and "proles" as they show how cool, or "kewl", they can be. They do so by mixing upper-case and lower-case letters, some of which they replace with numbers in the middle of words - so that "hacker" may be written "H4x0r" and the slang described as "133t5p34k". Think of the number one as a letter "L", the three as an "E", and you get the picture.
It is a confusing discipline for the "n00b" - sorry, newbie - but that is largely the point. All slang is designed to reinforce the identity of a distinct subculture, but this elite (or, if you're following,"31337") has particular technological reasons for developing such an eccentric jargon. One factor is that some e-mail programs filter out messages dealing with hackers, porn or the bootleg software known as wares - but the censors fail to stop them if typed as "hax0r5", "pr0n" and "war3z". The slang also favours a brevity that we have come to know through text-messaging shorthand: when the slang developed on bulletin-boards in the 1980s, the scarcity of bandwidth made "RU" a more practicable means of asking "Are you...?"
Now that bandwidth is no longer an issue, practitioners are turning to more elaborate ways of staying ahead of the crowd. Dollar signs in place of the letter "s" are used to signify corporate greed (as in"Micro$oft"); the letter "z" is put at the end of words to denote an illegal connection (so keep away from naughty "gamez downloadz"); and ever more esoteric keystroke combinations are used to signify letters. So the letter "M" might be rendered as" \/ " and "k" as "/This, my teacher proudly advised, constitutes "advanced elite speak" - or, as he typed it, "4 )V4 \ C3D l3e+$peA The Tim35 ...
++++
WATCH out: there's another "Nigerian"-style e-mail doing the rounds, seeking "a reliable and reputable person to handle a very confidential business transaction".
"I am writing to you in absolute confidence primarily to seek your assistance in acquiring oil funds that are presently trapped in the Republic of Iraq," begins the "highly confidential" sales pitch arriving in thousands of in-boxes this week. The writer, whose American father apparently came close to capturing billions in the region before falling out with his Iraqi business partner 12 years ago, now needs $100 billion to $200 billion to complete the deal and remove that former partner from office.
"I would beseech you to transfer a sum equalling 10 to 25 per cent of your yearly income into our account to aid in this important venture," it goes on, promising that "this business transaction is 100 per cent legal: the US Internal Revenue Service will function as our intermediary".
Strangely, the given e-mail reply address is "president@whitehouse.gov", and the letter is signed by one "George Walker Bush". Either it's a very funny parody by anti-war protesters, or the White House has noticed how many suckers get drawn into these scams.
(The Times, February 4 2003)
TECHNOLOGICAL revolutions always leave their mark on the English language from the shorthand informality of text-messaging to colourful slang such as "spam" that finds its way into mainstream use. But if you want to stay a step ahead of the dictionaries and understand what the internet elite is saying today, your only option is to learn their language, "elite speak". I have spent the past week taking lessons from an expert - an experience that has left my eyes glazed over.
You will have encountered elite speak if you have ever seen pirated software advertised as "warez" or a hacked website described as "h4x0r3d". A combination of deliberate misspellings and creative abbreviations, this slang allows insiders to stay ahead of "newbies" and "proles" as they show how cool, or "kewl", they can be. They do so by mixing upper-case and lower-case letters, some of which they replace with numbers in the middle of words - so that "hacker" may be written "H4x0r" and the slang described as "133t5p34k". Think of the number one as a letter "L", the three as an "E", and you get the picture.
It is a confusing discipline for the "n00b" - sorry, newbie - but that is largely the point. All slang is designed to reinforce the identity of a distinct subculture, but this elite (or, if you're following,"31337") has particular technological reasons for developing such an eccentric jargon. One factor is that some e-mail programs filter out messages dealing with hackers, porn or the bootleg software known as wares - but the censors fail to stop them if typed as "hax0r5", "pr0n" and "war3z". The slang also favours a brevity that we have come to know through text-messaging shorthand: when the slang developed on bulletin-boards in the 1980s, the scarcity of bandwidth made "RU" a more practicable means of asking "Are you...?"
Now that bandwidth is no longer an issue, practitioners are turning to more elaborate ways of staying ahead of the crowd. Dollar signs in place of the letter "s" are used to signify corporate greed (as in"Micro$oft"); the letter "z" is put at the end of words to denote an illegal connection (so keep away from naughty "gamez downloadz"); and ever more esoteric keystroke combinations are used to signify letters. So the letter "M" might be rendered as" \/ " and "k" as "/This, my teacher proudly advised, constitutes "advanced elite speak" - or, as he typed it, "4 )V4 \ C3D l3e+$peA The Tim35 ...
++++
WATCH out: there's another "Nigerian"-style e-mail doing the rounds, seeking "a reliable and reputable person to handle a very confidential business transaction".
"I am writing to you in absolute confidence primarily to seek your assistance in acquiring oil funds that are presently trapped in the Republic of Iraq," begins the "highly confidential" sales pitch arriving in thousands of in-boxes this week. The writer, whose American father apparently came close to capturing billions in the region before falling out with his Iraqi business partner 12 years ago, now needs $100 billion to $200 billion to complete the deal and remove that former partner from office.
"I would beseech you to transfer a sum equalling 10 to 25 per cent of your yearly income into our account to aid in this important venture," it goes on, promising that "this business transaction is 100 per cent legal: the US Internal Revenue Service will function as our intermediary".
Strangely, the given e-mail reply address is "president@whitehouse.gov", and the letter is signed by one "George Walker Bush". Either it's a very funny parody by anti-war protesters, or the White House has noticed how many suckers get drawn into these scams.
(The Times, February 4 2003)
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