Commonwealth Hackish
Hacker jargon as spoken outside the US, especially in the British Commonwealth.
It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce
truncations like "char" and "soc", etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed
to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names (especially
two-component names) tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot
wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix meta may be pronounced /mee't*/;
similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/, zeta is usually /zee't*/, and
so forth. Preferred metasyntactic variables include blurgle, "eek", "ook",
"frodo", and "bilbo"; "wibble", "wobble", and in emergencies "wubble"; "banana",
"tom", "dick", "harry", "wombat", "frog", fish, and so on and on (see foo).
Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes "-o-rama", "frenzy" (as in
feeding frenzy), and "city" (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump
frenzy!"). Finally, note that the American terms "parens", "brackets", and
"braces" for (), [], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers
"brackets", "square brackets", and "curly brackets". Also, the use of "pling"
for bang is common outside the United States.
See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey, fish, go-faster
stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky heap, lord high fixer, loose bytes,
muddie, nadger, noddy, psychedelicware, plingnet, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie,
spod, sun lounge, terminal junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel, YABA, and
notes or definitions under Bad Thing, barf, bum, chase pointers, cosmic rays,
crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nibble,
proglet, root, SEX, tweak, and xyzzy.
[Jargon File]
(1995-01-18)
Nearby terms:
Common Objects « Common Program Interface « Common
User Access « Commonwealth Hackish »
Communicating Functional Processes » Communicating
Sequential Processes » Communications Decency Act
|
