What is the deal with this shorthand crap?

Question

If I see one more person type "2" instead of "to" or "too" my head will explode.

Answer 1

I thought that was Ebonics

Answer 2

Yeah, it's pretty fscking irritating alright. It's not even l33t-speak, most teenagers using this shorthand all over the net wouldn't know what l33t-speak was, it's just laziness and stupidity basically.

Answer 3

eye 2 4 u.

Answer 4

me 2

Answer 5

It's called Leet. It's all hacker wannabes. It'll be around for a while, so you might as well get used to it if you're going to use the internet.

Answer 6

The vocabulary of Internet slang draws from many different sources — typically environments that placed value on brevity of communication. Some terms, such as FUBAR have roots as far back as World War II.[1] Other terms come from more recent forms of communication, such as TTY and IRC. There are several sources of slang terms:

abbrevations, such as addy for address
acronyms and initialisms, such as lol for laughing out loud
common typing errors which are affected deliberately, such as teh for 'the'
uncommon but humorous mis-spellings adopted to satirise the source or acknowledge a shared knowledge of an in-joke, such as liek for 'like', as in I LIEK MILK!!!!!
deliberate munging or obscuring, including 1337 speak and Rot13
military and hacker canon, including SNAFU, cruft etc.
attempts to convey facial expressions and emotion, including for grin, for big grin etc..
tags meant to resemble HTML code. For example, in HTML, when "" and "" are placed around text, a web browser will display it in boldface. Because emotions and inflection do not apply to text, Internet users will feign HTML tags for such emphasis, such as '' '' or ''. These 'tags' are often meant to be generally humorous, and are ironically pragmatic.
emoticons (also known as smileys)
In some cases the source may be obscure or there may be multiple sources. An email or usenet signature is usually referred to as a sig or .sig; this may be an abbreviation or it may refer to the common signature file extension in *nix operating systems.

Many of the terms originated to save keystrokes or bytes in the days of low bandwidth links, comparable to the abbreviations used in wireless telegraphy and telegrams, so can be seen from the earliest days of bulletin board systems. A handful (for example, ASAP, PO'ed) far pre-date computers. The three-letter acronym remains one of the most popular types of abbreviation in computing and telecom terminology and slang. Similar systems have since come into use with users of text-messaging wireless telephones.

With the rise of instant messaging services (ICQ, AOL, and MSN, among others) the vocabulary has expanded dramatically. The abbreviations used in this medium share much with SMS language.

Sometimes users make up abbreviations on the spot, therefore many of them can seem confusing, obscure, whimsical, or even nonsensical. Another feature common to Internet communication involves the truncation and morphing of words to forms that users can type more readily.

Answer 7

1337, 17 15 n07 f0r n0085!

Answer 8

Probably it's an artifact of text messaging. It's annoying here, though.

Answer 9

It's called "leet":
http://home.no.net/hellshl/main/translate.html

Answer 10

I'm tired of reading incorrect grammar in general.

Answer 11

I'm on your side. I guess we've reached the point in this society where people can flout their ignorance.