Please Can We Stop With The Numeronyms?

This Tomf3ery Is Making Me Uncomfortable

I’m a grumpy old man. I get it. I’m also perpetually late to the meme party. Fine.

I remember reading the General Protection Fault comic strip* in 2001, and it took me longer than I’d care to admit to realize that the speech bubbles of the aliens / robots / whatever** were written in leetspeak and actually readable. As someone who spent a lot of time on IRC servers in the mid-90’s, I’m a little surprised that that was my first real encounter, but whatever.

* I can’t believe it’s still going! It’s an excellent, old-school webcomic.

** I’d have to re-read the comics to find a specific reference, I didn’t find anything during a quick review of the GPF wiki

1337speak is at least somewhat legible.

I mean, 17'5 50/V\\\’}{@7 13g!813. \\\’}{@73\/3|2. I can 707@11Y h@xx0r it.

Many years later, though, I came across i18n for the first time.

According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was “S12n”, the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. By 1985, colleagues who found Jan’s…