In our continuing series on online and ancient communication, our friends at Language Log have discovered that l33tspeak was responsible for the fall of Rome.
The villain was none other than txting, that widely-feared destroyer of civilizations. While IM and SMS had not yet been invented, the Romans used a medium that motivates textual concision even more strongly: marble.
I shudder at the use of “8” in words like “l8r,” but we had entire millenia where you did not write vowels.
: Zubon