Let me be blunt. Online gamers are not cool people. Making up the word 'w00t' is not cool. Making up the word 'w00t' is like being in eighth grade and writing the word 'WaReZ' on stuff. This should not be emulated in the real world, much less actively recruited into it. A more efficient way of representing the alphabet is texting '4' instead of 'four', or '2moro' instead of 'tomorrow'. That's cool. What's not cool is writing in public correspondence or a class paper -- because that's what you do with words -- the phrase h0LLaZ @ ya 8itChz. That's hella stupid. That's not 'simply a different' form of dictionary English -- at least not until Merriam-Webster gets its trite, self-abasing hands on it. What real word are you more efficiently representing with the letters 'w00t'? Woot? Woughte?
Dictionaries have come a long way since Johnson. It's a long way towards pointlessness, but a long way.
UPDATE: Fixed a link.
