d3ath 2 3nGli5h

First of all, I just want to say that I was once the girl who tYped lYke dIs. It peaked in middle school when I was a notorious note passer (I knew 7 different ways to fold a note).
But shorthand has gotten to a point where I seriously cannot follow it anymore. If I am reading something by a shorthand writer, I have to have Urban dictionary open in a separate window. It is worse than reading Dickens. Along with having to look up every other "word," I am peeved by the fact that it is not English. There aren't suppose to be numbers mixed in with the letters. Unless you have a speech impediment, "th" does not make the "d" sound. And yes, Y is sometimes a vowel, but not quite as often as you think.
1337. I had to look it up earlier. It is the numerical representation of "leet." Leet, or sometimes eleet (31337) comes from the word "elite" meaning superior. As in "I am hella 1337 at WoW."
But it goes further than that. 1337 is actually a language first created by computer hackers. They misspell words, spell words phonetically, replace letters with numbers, and basically make up a bunch of crap that then get proliferated across the computer-using network.
Technology is destroying English.

You know what this is like? This is like Newspeak in 1984. Now there's a scary thought.