D1d u kn0w F@c3b00k h4s a l337 sp3@k l4ngu@g3 0p7i0n? If you didn't before, you do now—though using the site with it turned on is more insufferable than reading my first sentence in this post. For those who didn't participate in the early days of the Internet, l337 sp3@k (or "leet speak") was once a popular way to communicate online among the geek community, though it has largely fallen by the wayside in these modern times of using real words to talk to other people.

But on Facebook, you can still change your default language option to "Leet Speak," as well as "Pirate" and a plethora of other languages. (Load up the main site and scroll to the very bottom—your current language setting is in the bottom right next to links to the privacy policy.) This obscure setting has actually been there since at least 2008 but remained unknown to the general population until fairly recently. And up until Friday, the Leet Speak setting changed the gender on women's profiles to "54ndw1ch m4k3r," or "sandwich maker." The gender on men's profiles remained "Male."

This eyebrow-raising description of women was brought to my attention by the reddit community on Thursday evening (a sort of cousin site to Ars Technica—but one of our favorite cousins!). The cantankerous response to the discovery was warranted—after all, this wasn't a user-created Facebook app or add-on. It's an official language option offered by the multi-billion dollar company that recently filed for IPO to become public. Such a "joke" about how geek men apparently see women is tasteless at best and offensive at worst. But no matter whether your funny bone was tickled, it was surprising to see out of such a big company that declared in October of 2011 that "women are the power users of social." According to a Pew study from 2011, women made up 58 percent of all Facebook users.

In the interest of hearing all sides of the situation—it's only fair—I fired off an e-mail to our contacts at Facebook PR asking for comment on the "54ndw1ch m4k3r" description. Not long after the e-mail was sent, I checked the settings again and "54ndw1ch m4k3r" had quietly been changed to "Female" under the Leet Speak option.

But why did Facebook wait until now to do so? Renowned sex educator and privacy writer Violet Blue wrote about this exact issue on ZDNet in January of 2012, but received nary a nod from Facebook. We can't know whether they were aware of this issue previously, but it certainly seems strange that Facebook would seemingly ignore a publication as well-known as ZDNet.

On Friday evening, Facebook spokesperson Victoria Cassidy responded to my request for comment (hours after the company had already changed the description). "Some users of the translations app had 'translated' that and we have since removed the content," she said. Cassidy did not comment further on why the former description had remained there for nearly four years.

Whatever the case, the description has now been changed. With "hilarious" Facebook profiles such as "Buying a sandwich-maker, so you can dump your girlfriend," and meme images floating around the Internet like these:

it's not hard to see why the reasonable adults who run Facebook would want to make their official company offerings a little more civil here in 2012. N0w b4ck t0 y0ur r3gul4rly sch3dul3d "l337 sp3@k" pr0gr4m.