A technically-minded friend invited me to a party via e-mail and used a few words of the geeky dialect known as l337$p34k, or leetspeak ("leet" being short for elite). It is primarily used by programmers and gamers. The idea in l337 is to be as creative as possible in replacing letters with other characters. Not to be outdone, I responded in kind proudly showing off a recently aquired (though somewhat superficial) l337 vocabulary of my own:
THX 4 the invite. sorry I couldn't come kr it 4 u. so how ../../uz it?
~4 ll4/../..4
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Great minds think alike...alot must go undiscovered.
After receiving a reply, in which the post-post-script referred to my little semantic-antics, I composed the following as both an excuse-explanation and a chance to write an essay about the subject dragging me into the world of l337 in the first place:
> pps What's ~4 ll4/../..4 mean?
Therein lies a tale...I first noticed something unusual about "llama" back when I was something of an addict to Maxis SimGames. Every game would have some reference to them, often annoyingly frequent. For instance, in SimCity all sports complexes have teams named after llamas and your first reward (for population growth) is a Braun Llama Dome, not to mention many random occurences in the news ticker. I found all of this quite maddening - what was the big deal?! You've no idea how many sleepless nights I spent contemplating the significance of llamas...I finally concluded that it must be some inside joke at Maxis.
Then came _The_Emperor's_New_Groove_. I was on the verge of forming conspiracy theories; but happily, once upon the web I encountered a l337 tutorial (btw, that is my sole reason for knowing any l337). While no formal definition was given, contextual usage and crude hypothesis has allowed me to construct the following: ll4/../..4 - n. A general term of derision that l337ists apply to the non-l337, esp to inexperienced show-offs.[akin non-l337 sophomoric, imposter, lexiphanic]
Finally, here was something to go on...but a l337 origin of this definition would still not explain the convenient plot parallels found in _The_Emperor's_New_Groove. I suppose the idea might have been imported to the cinema world by some computer animator. Last semester, yet another piece of evidence was brought to my attention b/c as part of my HUM 399 course I watched _Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grail (...and why that was considered academic I still don't know). Several species of llamas were credited...suspicious. Then too was the fact that SimCity's highest speed is African-Swallow. Curiouser and curiouser. Perhaps cinema is the real origin, or the etymology may run deeper still...
The tilde sign part is just my habitual way of signing off. At first it was just a convenient quasi-graphic for said purpose, but the mathematical implication of approximation makes it funny to use aliases with. My basic intent in signing off ~4 ll4/../..4 was to give a disclaimer for any misuse of l337 - but is seems my greatest misusage was the disclaimer itself...ah well, such is life.
~Jennifer
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"It's a UNIX system! It shows you everything to do!" -Lex in Jurassic Park
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