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"L33T" Speak Invades Schools
Masem writes "NYTimes reports on how common chat room/IM shortcuts (such as 'u' for you, 'r' for are, etc) are creeping into the classroom and homework assignments from those teenage kids that spend a significant amount of time in chat programs. This is giving the teachers headaches in trying to grade the assignments, much less understand them because of the techno-generation gap, and to try to prevent further abuse of the language, have begun penalizing students for using the net slang. Students sometimes don't even realize they use the chat room shorthand until it's pointed out to them, because that method of chatting has become second nature to them."
I was wondering why my spell checker was having such a hard time with the absence of punctuation and plethora of acronyms.
When will they come out with M$ w3Rd 31337 ?
"Kinky sex involves the use of duck feathers. Perverted sex involves the whole duck." - Lewis Grizzard
I work for a hedge fund, and I regularly get emails from a Managing Director that say things like "r u sure we should do that". No punctuation, no caps.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
D33r MrZ. butts3x0r
U g0tz a k1d d4t 41n7 d01n h1z w3rK r1t3, b1zn0tch! h3 k33p t4lk1n L1k3 h3 41n7 g0tZ n0 c3ntz! WTF? U = p3n1s 1n U aZZ!
sux0rz 2BU! h0p3 y3r br4t g3tz h1z NUTZ ch0ppa 0ff!
-Mr. Demarcus
History Department
I'm currently in my senior year of engineering school. As one of our requirements, we must take a course in Technical Communication, which is basicly the art of writing memos and proposals. I wasn't really looking forward to the class, but I was ok with an easy class before graduation. Well... The technical communications instructor writes in chat speak. Her communication skills are ok, but I would expect her to teach by example, yet every one of her e-mails to the class has used u->you, r->are, etc. This is a college instructor in technical communication, and she can't even remember when to use proper grammar!!
chalkboard:
...
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
If there was ever a reason for corporal punishment in schools, 1337 speak would be it.
Could someone please post the article here on Slashdot? I keep trying to read it on the NY Times website, but my eyes are continually drawn towards "Eve Brecker". And she's WHAT??? Only 15!?!??! Oh lord.....
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
You know, the ones who play FPSes and are constantly yelling at each other! If they're going to stay 1337, they need to keep talking differently than others. One day, I'm going to log onto a quake server and see this:
EliteFellow: Ah-ha! My aiming skills are unmatched. I have such prowess it is as though I own you.
TricksterMan: Not so! Network latency has inhibited my natural reflexes!
EliteFellow: You deserved your comeuppance, you have been jealously guarding the Quadruple Damage for some time now without moving elsewhere!
I think that would scare me more than leetspeak, really.
-Denor
It cracks me up to think there are people who believe that just because something is birthed of the internet it is devine. Be it music piracy, netslang, software piracy. I remember when I was an IRC junky I had to re-learn how to spell when it came back to the real world. Not to sound like an old geezer but people need to speak plain english, or whatever language you may speak. For those quick to point out my mispellings kiss my a** i'm a recovering undernetoholic.
School assignments should be written in grammatically correct English, using proper spelling.
So should Slashdot editorials, but how likely is that?
I've picked up a lot of bad habits, particularly leaving the first word/words off sentences, because typing on muds and channels on GEnie (which was mentioned on /. some time back) and the less you type, the more you say, simple economy. Bad grammar though. i.e. "Going to store?" rather than "Are you going to the store?"
However, the language evolves, as we the people use it, hence dialects across demographic rather than physical terrain. Neat, when you consider this is yet another affect of a wired world.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
7h1s c0mm3nt iz w4ck! D00d3rZ, y c4nt u p0s7 m0r3 0ff3n?
Bah. 40% off for just one sentence?
How about this one: At my HS, we were required to memorize Areopagitica (sp?) by Milton. I didn't. I remembered the last name (Milton). So he took about 5-10% off per missing word. After filling the entire margin with Xs (the guy had a very strong OCD) he gave me my final mark (drumroll): -378%
Beat that!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
One of my kids from summer camp was IM'ing me and was using these alternate spellings. The problem was the alternate spelling of "come" :
"will u cum to camp next year?"
"please cum"
Some things should be fixed before they go too far.
I don't see how "any hot F's want 2 chat?" could be construed as an essay.
+h3 c0rr3c+ 4n5|/\|3r 15 "nu+z".
Is your wife hot? Post some pictures.
I wonder how many high school kids beat off thinking about your wife.
I haven't had much of a problem as of yet with elite haX0r speak invading my real world, but I have had a problem with constantly typing 'look' and enter or 'score' and enter or 'inv' and enter while on ICQ or IRC. I guess playing time on Sojourn3 is catching up with me again.
Oh well,
who sort
I guess that's what we get for living online these days.
l
sc
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
oh not at all. We should create a deviate dubbed "e-bonics".. In the TRUE sense of the word :)
Bitch you KNOW the side.. WORLD MAFUCKIN WIDE..
"Spell checkers are not bad if they do not have to rely on them."
;)
...
"... but now they most definately are."
I definitely agree with you.
NYTeemes repurts oon hoo cummun chet ruum/IM shurtcoots (sooch es 'oo' fur yuoo, 'r' fur ere-a, itc) ere-a creepeeng intu zee clessruum und humoourk esseegnments frum thuse-a teenege-a keeds thet spend a seegnifficunt emuoont ooff teeme-a in chet prugrems. Um gesh dee bork, bork! Thees is geefing zee teechers heedeches in tryeeng tu grede-a zee esseegnments, mooch less understund zeem becoose-a ooff zee technu-genereshun gep, und tu try tu prefent foorzeer eboose-a ooff zee lungooege-a, hefe-a begoon peneleezing stoodents fur useeng zee net slung. Stoodents sumeteemes dun't ifee reeleeze-a zeey use-a zee chet ruum shurthund unteel it's pueented oooot tu zeem, becoose-a thet methud ooff chetteeng hes becume-a secund netoore-a tu zeem.
Lets see..
0ur F47h3r, wH0 4r7 n h34V3n, h4110w3d b3 7HY n4m3, 7hy k1ngd0m c0m3, 7hy wI11 b d0n3, 0N 34r7h 4s i7 iS iN h34v3n. G1v3 u5 th15 d4y 0ur d4i1y br34d, & f0rg1v3 u5 0ur tr35p45535, 4s w3 f0rg1v3 7h05e wh0 tr35p455 4g41n5t u5.
Granted, im not even remotely versed in lamespeek.. but thats about how it would look.
I am a slow typer as well. Can't you see how slow the letters are appearing?
My HS AP English teacher...
Whenever the conversation turns to HS English teachers, I think back to 9th grade, and my evil HS English teacher, Mrs. Lee.
She told me at the beginning of the year that I would most likely fail her class, "because you're an actor, Wil, and actors are usually stupid."
I was aghast, because I'd always gotten extremely good grades in English and Creative Writing.
She made good on her word, though. She would often take points off of my papers because of my "style," which she said was "terrible."
It was galling to me that an English teacher could apply her own subjective judgement to something like "style," and use it as an excuse to give me bad grades. I vowed to someday exact my revenge by becoming a successful writer.
Right now, I write for a TV show, my website, and I'm working on two books, both fictional, one semi-autobiographical. When they are published, I will dedicate them to Mrs. Lee.
D33r MrZ. butts3x0r
Dear Mrs. Endlove,
U g0tz a k1d d4t 41n7 d01n h1z w3rK r1t3, b1zn0tch!
Your son is not completing his assignment correctly, ma'am.
h3 k33p t4lk1n L1k3 h3 41n7 g0tZ n0 c3ntz!
His manner of writing indicates a lack of formative education.
WTF?
I wonder why this might be the case?
U = p3n1s 1n U aZZ!
My experience tells me this is usually the result of poor parenting. For instance, a child's mother may spend more time with her husband or boyfriend than with her child, robbing him of important life lessons.
sux0rz 2BU!
The results of a bad upbringing reflect negatively on the responsible parent.
h0p3 y3r br4t g3tz h1z NUTZ ch0ppa 0ff!
Your son may find it difficult to complete his assignments at school, and may experience ridicule from his peers.
You're right...but at 14, I was quite lame...Usenet can confirm this. =]
These people fail to take into account George W. Bush.
All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy sig. . .
Haha! That just made my day. Now I say we translate the whoel thing, print it, bind it, and leave it in nightstands at low-end hotels! 1337 Gideons?
I was wondering where alt.MrsLee.die.die.die came from
10001010101011000010100100001010101010101010101000 00101010010101010110010110100101010101010101001001 01010010101
This is how it would look when we get those brain implented microchips. Look how great this is no ambiguity at all.
Thanks for the challenge. I haven't done long multiplication in years. BTW, KCalc displays the answer as: 1.99242e+09.
I can see it now:
Note on a students assignment:
"Learn to FSCKING spell!!!1!11!".
Oh, the irony.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
|\/|y |)0g 8 17.
You have been selected to represent the school at the national grammar rodeo at the Sheraton Hotel in Canada.
All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy sig. . .
Well, that's just a character-substitution. To really translate the language, you'd need to update the older idioms.
(For instance, see how 1384's language "And foryeue to us oure dettis at is oure synnys as we foryeuen to oure dettouris at is to men at han synned in us" - which my layman's re-reading works like this: "And forgive (to) us our debt that is our sins, as we forgive (to) our debtors that is to men that have sinned in (against) us" - states explicitly the theological notion that sin is debt, whereas this notion had become implicit by 1611's wording.)
So - The Lord's Prayer, theology mostly intact, but rendered in 2002 'leetspeak:
... of this story is that there are so many posts along thw lines of the kids of today ... when you sitback and realize the forum you have chosen to put your point across is slashdot, not exactly know for it's great adherance to everyday grammer.
The problems come not from the tools themselves, but the misuse.
:) Let's just say that you've never "admin'd" until you've run sqlplus from an SSH session on a Palm using grafiti! It just feels UN-NATURAL!
And it's NOT just the kids!
I'm an Oracle DBA/Developer/CTO and am responsible for the hiring/firing of technical staff.
It absolutely amazes me to see the number of people that have become totally reliant on GUIs and other tools for doing DB administration.
Case in point:
I found this one person who seemed to REALLY know her stuff... new all of the correct procedures, concepts, etc. for some pretty advanced Oracle config/admin. I was impressed... enough to call her back for a second interview that was more of a "hands-on" practical.
She sat down at the workstation, I brought up an SSH session to the box, and asked her to tell me what the default ORACLE_SID, ORACLE_HOME, etc. was.
She then proceded to start looking around in the "program groups" on the Windoze START menu, and she seemed to be getting a little uncomfortable. I was kind of confused, and eventually asked her what she was doing. "I'm looking for the Oracle programs," she said. I told her, "Ahhh, there aren't any on this box... it's all installed on the Sun box downstairs... this command line is logged into that box, in the Oracle Dev account". She then asked for the console for the box, so she could at LEAST launch OEM to see what was going on. She also asked what other software we use for our DB admin.
At the end of the day, the bottom line was that she didn't have a CLUE how to use the command line interface, or make the "raw" SQL calls from SQL/PLUS to do her job... she'd only learnt how to do that stuff using about $40k in administrative GUI software. In order for us to get our immediate value out of her, we'd have to provide her with that software.
That was just un-acceptable, from my point of view.
For that matter, most of our DBA's rely on "home-grown" shell scripts that do the work for them, and are major proponents of Oracle bringing back the command line install. (Down with the GUI!)
My policy is that GUIs (like calculators) are a luxury, and not a requirement. In my company, you WILL understand how things work at the most primitive of levels (command line, vi, etc.). Once you understand that, you're more than welcome to use whatever "crutches" (GUIs, etc.) that you want to improve your productivity. But at the end of the day, if you're administrating one of my boxes, and I give you an SSH session to that box, you WILL be able to do every aspect of your job. I don't care if you have to fumble a bit to figure out exactly how to do so, but you WILL be able to get the job done.
That philosophy has saved our asses in a couple of weird situations.
$0.02 (CDN)
0wr F4th3R, wh0 0wnz h34\/3n, j00 r0x0rs! M4y 4|| 0wr b4s3 s0m3d4y Bl0ng t0 j00! M4y j00 0wn 34rth juss |1|3 j00 0wn h34\/3n. G1v3 us th1s d4y 0wr w4r3z, mp3z, 'n pr0n thr0ugh a ph4t |. 4nd cut us s0m3 sl4ck wh3n w3 4ct lik3 n00b l4m3rz, juss 4s w3 g1v3 n00bz 4 l34rn1n wh3n th3y l4m3 2 us. Pl34s3 d0n't l3t us 0wn s0m3 p00r d00d'z b0x3n wh3n w3'r3 t00 p1ss3d t0 th1nk 4b0ut wh4t's r1ght 4nd wr0ng, 4nd 1f j00 c0uld k33p th3 f3i 0ff 0wr b4ckz, w3'd 'pr3c14t3 1t. F0r j00 0wn 4ll 0wr b0x3n 43v3r 4nd 3v3r, 4m3n!
:)
Now if that's not as incomprehensible as old English, I don't know what is.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I can understand where these students are coming from.
When I was in elementary school, I found a secret decoder wheel in a box of... (checks box on shelf) Lucky Charms. I got so used to using it that I began encoding all my homework without thinking about it. My teachers didn't mind so long as I provided them with a secret decoder wheel of their own.
I was reading about encryption when I was in high school, and I would inadvertently switch into encoded mode, change the binary text to ASCII and write the corresponding binary string of numbers. Boy, was my English teacher mad when I turned in 20-page-long handwritten short essays... especially when I explained that the key was "mrs<omitted>sucks"
Still, the unencoded version used proper spelling and grammar, so there wasn't much she could do about it -- except send me to the principal's office. If these kids want to protect their intellectual property by encoding it (in their case, they're using L33t speak), they should at least adhere to proper grammar and spelling.
</sarcasm>
That leaves `E', which could be twisted to mean he/she. Then A, E, I, O, and U would all be valid words. Yet sometimes you might ask: Y?
last year my English class had 2 do a slideshow on Henry V (play not the king)(Shakespeare) and for fun my group made a l337 version. We mistakenly gave the wrong one to our teacher. There were things like this all though it: (own dialect of 1337 in some places)
|)13 |=|23|\|(|-|135 ! (Die Frenchies die!)
r0x0r'd ur b0x0r5! (Rocked your boxor's! (kicked butt))
Needless to say our teacher though the file was corrupt and gave us an extension! lol