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Chapter 1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture
This document is a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures of computer hackers. Though some technical material is included for background and flavor, it is not a technical dictionary; what we describe here is the language hackers use among themselves for fun, social communication, and technical debate.
The 'hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. Because hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves partly by rejection of 'normal' values and working habits, it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional culture less than 50 years old.
As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold places in the community and expresses shared values and experiences. Also as usual, not knowing the slang (or using it inappropriately) defines one as an outsider, a mundane, or (worst of all in hackish vocabulary) possibly even a
suit. All human cultures use slang in this threefold way — as a tool of communication, and of inclusion, and of exclusion.
Among hackers, though, slang has a subtler aspect, paralleled perhaps in the slang of jazz musicians and some kinds of fine artists but hard to detect in most technical or scientific cultures; parts of it are code for shared states of consciousness. There is a whole range of altered states and problem-solving mental stances basic to high-level hacking which don't fit into conventional linguistic reality any better than a Coltrane solo or one of Maurits Escher's surreal trompe l'oeil compositions (Escher is a favorite of hackers), and hacker slang encodes these subtleties in many unobvious ways. As a simple example, take the distinction between a kluge and an elegant solution, and the differing connotations attached to each. The distinction is not only of engineering significance; it reaches right back into the nature of the generative processes in program design and asserts something important about two different kinds of relationship between the hacker and the hack. Hacker slang is unusually rich in implications of this kind, of overtones and undertones that illuminate the hackish psyche.
Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence. Further, the electronic media which knit them together are fluid, 'hot' connections, well adapted to both the dissemination of new slang and the ruthless culling of weak and superannuated specimens. The results of this process give us perhaps a uniquely intense and accelerated view of linguistic evolution in action.
Hacker slang also challenges some common linguistic and anthropological assumptions. For example, in the early 1990s it became fashionable to speak of 'low-context' versus 'high-context' communication, and to classify cultures by the preferred context level of their languages and art forms. It is usually claimed that low-context communication (characterized by precision, clarity, and completeness of self-contained utterances) is typical in cultures which value logic, objectivity, individualism, and competition; by contrast, high-context communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded) is associated with cultures which value subjectivity, consensus, cooperation, and tradition. What then are we to make of hackerdom, which is themed around extremely low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily "low-context" values, but cultivates an almost absurdly high-context slang style?
The intensity and consciousness of hackish invention make a compilation of hacker slang a particularly effective window into the surrounding culture — and, in fact, this one is the latest version of an evolving compilation called the 'Jargon File', maintained by hackers themselves since the early 1970s. This one (like its ancestors) is primarily a lexicon, but also includes topic entries which collect background or sidelight information on hacker culture that would be awkward to try to subsume under individual slang definitions.
Though the format is that of a reference volume, it is intended that the material be enjoyable to browse. Even a complete outsider should find at least a chuckle on nearly every page, and much that is amusingly thought-provoking. But it is also true that hackers use humorous wordplay to make strong, sometimes combative statements about what they feel. Some of these entries reflect the views of opposing sides in disputes that have been genuinely passionate; this is deliberate. We have not tried to moderate or pretty up these disputes; rather we have attempted to ensure that everyone's sacred cows get gored, impartially. Compromise is not particularly a hackish virtue, but the honest presentation of divergent viewpoints is.
The reader with minimal computer background who finds some references incomprehensibly technical can safely ignore them. We have not felt it either necessary or desirable to eliminate all such; they, too, contribute flavor, and one of this document's major intended audiences — fledgling hackers already partway inside the culture — will benefit from them.
A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor is included in Appendix A. The 'outside' reader's attention is particularly directed to the Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B. The Bibliography, lists some non-technical works which have either influenced or described the hacker culture.
Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one each individual must choose by action to join), one should not be surprised that the line between description and influence can become more than a little blurred. Earlier versions of the Jargon File have played a central role in spreading hacker language and the culture that goes with it to successively larger populations, and we hope and expect that this one will do likewise.
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Chapter 2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak
Part I. Introduction --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak
Linguists usually refer to informal language as 'slang' and reserve the term 'jargon' for the technical vocabularies of various occupations. However, the ancestor of this collection was called the 'Jargon File', and hacker slang is traditionally 'the jargon'. When talking about the jargon there is therefore no convenient way to distinguish it from what a linguist would call hackers' jargon — the formal vocabulary they learn from textbooks, technical papers, and manuals.
To make a confused situation worse, the line between hacker slang and the vocabulary of technical programming and computer science is fuzzy, and shifts over time. Further, this vocabulary is shared with a wider technical culture of programmers, many of whom are not hackers and do not speak or recognize hackish slang.
Accordingly, this lexicon will try to be as precise as the facts of usage permit about the distinctions among three categories:
slang
informal language from mainstream English or non-technical subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc).
jargon
without qualifier, denotes informal 'slangy' language peculiar to or predominantly found among hackers — the subject of this lexicon.
techspeak
the formal technical vocabulary of programming, computer science, electronics, and other fields connected to hacking.
This terminology will be consistently used throughout the remainder of this lexicon.
The jargon/techspeak distinction is the delicate one. A lot of techspeak originated as jargon, and there is a steady continuing uptake of jargon into techspeak. On the other hand, a lot of jargon arises from overgeneralization of techspeak terms (there is more about this in the Jargon Construction section below).
In general, we have considered techspeak any term that communicate primarily by a denotation well established in textbooks, technical dictionaries, or standards documents.
A few obviously techspeak terms (names of operating systems, languages, or documents) are listed when they are tied to hacker folklore that isn't covered in formal sources, or sometimes to convey critical historical background necessary to understand other entries to which they are cross-referenced. Some other techspeak senses of jargon words are listed in order to make the jargon senses clear; where the text does not specify that a straight technical sense is under discussion, these are marked with '[techspeak]' as an etymology. Some entries have a primary sense marked this way, with subsequent jargon meanings explained in terms of it.
We have also tried to indicate (where known) the apparent origins of terms. The results are probably the least reliable information in the lexicon, for several reasons. For one thing, it is well known that many hackish usages have been independently reinvented multiple times, even among the more obscure and intricate neologisms. It often seems that the generative processes underlying hackish jargon formation have an internal logic so powerful as to create substantial parallelism across separate cultures and even in different languages! For another, the networks tend to propagate innovations so quickly that 'first use' is often impossible to pin down. And, finally, compendia like this one alter what they observe by implicitly stamping cultural approval on terms and widening their use.
Despite these problems, the organized collection of jargon-related oral history for the new compilations has enabled us to put to rest quite a number of folk etymologies, place credit where credit is due, and illuminate the early history of many important hackerisms such as kluge, cruft, and foo. We believe specialist lexicographers will find many of the historical notes more than casually instructive.
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Chapter 3. Revision History
Part I. Introduction
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Chapter 3. Revision History
The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).
The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as 'jargon-1' or 'the File') was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this time until the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there. Some terms in it date back considerably earlier (frob and some senses of moby, for instance, go back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and are believed to date at least back to the early 1960s). The revisions of jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered 'Version 1'.
In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to 'AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON.
The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the '>' caused versioning under ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr. Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of correcting the term 'jargon' to 'slang' until the compendium had already become widely known as the Jargon File.
Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations).
The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages.
In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly (issue 29, pages 26—35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication.
A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was edited by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did Richard M. Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow. This book (now out of print) is hereafter referred to as 'Steele-1983' and those six as the Steele-1983 coauthors.
Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to facilitate the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the 'temporary' freeze to become permanent.
The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated LISP Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved ITS.
The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD Unix standard.
In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at Digital Equipment Corporation. The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how wide its influence was to be.
By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies obtained off the ARPANET, circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hacker language and humor. Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related materials such as the Some AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously — but the Jargon File, having passed from living document to icon, remained essentially untouched for seven years.
This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after careful consultation with the editors of Steele-1983). It merges in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now also obsolete.
This new version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim is to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all the technical computing cultures wherein the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of the entries now derive from Usenet and represent jargon now current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts have been made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM mainframe world.
Eric S. Raymond
(Warning: other email addresses and URLs appear in this file but are not guaranteed to be correct after date of publication. Don't email us if an attempt to reach someone bounces — we have no magic way of checking addresses or looking up people. If a web reference goes stale, try a Google or Alta Vista search for relevant phrases.
Please try to review a recent copy of the on-line document before submitting entries; it is available on the Web. It will often contain new material not recorded in the latest paper snapshot that could save you some typing. It also includes some submission guidelines not reproduced here.
The 2.9.6 version became the main text of The New Hacker's Dictionary, by Eric Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6.
The 3.0.0 version was published in August 1993 as the second edition of The New Hacker's Dictionary, again from MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-18154-1).
The 4.0.0 version was published in September 1996 as the third edition of The New Hacker's Dictionary from MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-68092-0).
The maintainers are committed to updating the on-line version of the Jargon File through and beyond paper publication, and will continue to make it available to archives and public-access sites as a trust of the hacker community.
Here is a chronology of major revisions:
Version Date Lines Words Characters Entries Comments
2.1.1 Jun 12 1990 5485 42842 278958 790 The Jargon File comes alive again after a seven-year hiatus. Reorganization and massive additions were by Eric S. Raymond, approved by Guy Steele. Many items of UNIX, C, USENET, and microcomputer-based jargon were added at that time.
2.1.5 Nov 28 1990 6028 46946 307510 866 Changes and additions by ESR in response to numerous USENET submissions and comment from the First Edition co-authors. The Bibliography (Appendix C) was also appended.
2.2.1 Dec 15 1990 9394 75954 490501 1046 Most of the contents of the 1983 paper edition edited by Guy Steele was merged in. Many more USENET submissions added, including the International Style and the material on Commonwealth Hackish.
2.3.1 Jan 03 1991 10728 85070 558261 1138 The great format change — case is no longer smashed in lexicon keys and cross-references. A very few entries from jargon-1 which were basically straight techspeak were deleted; this enabled the rest of Appendix B (created in 2.1.1) to be merged back into main text and the appendix replaced with the Portrait of J. Random Hacker. More USENET submissions were added.
2.4.1 Jan 14 1991 12362 97819 642899 1239 The Story of Mel and many more USENET submissions merged in. More material on hackish writing habits added. Numerous typo fixes.
2.6.1 Feb 12 1991 15011 118277 774942 1484 Second great format change; no more <> around headwords or references. Merged in results of serious copy-editing passes by Guy Steele, Mark Brader. Still more entries added.
2.7.1 Mar 01 1991 16087 126885 831872 1533 New section on slang/jargon/techspeak added. Results of Guy's second edit pass merged in.
2.8.1 Mar 22 1991 17154 135647 888333 1602 Material from the TMRC Dictionary and MRC's editing pass merged in.
2.9.6 Aug 16 1991 18952 148629 975551 1702 Corresponds to reproduction copy for book.
2.9.8 Jan 01 1992 19509 153108 1006023 1760 First public release since the book, including over fifty new entries and numerous corrections/additions to old ones. Packaged with version 1.1 of vh(1) hypertext reader.
2.9.9 Apr 01 1992 20298 159651 1048909 1821 Folded in XEROX PARC lexicon.
2.9.10 Jul 01 1992 21349 168330 1106991 1891 lots of new historical material.
2.9.11 Jan 01 1993 21725 171169 1125880 1922 Lots of new historical material.
2.9.12 May 10 1993 22238 175114 1152467 1946 A few new entries & changes, marginal MUD/IRC slang and some borderline techspeak removed, all in preparation for 2nd Edition of TNHD.
3.0.0 Jul 27 1993 22548 177520 1169372 1961 Manuscript freeze for 2nd edition of TNHD.
3.1.0 Oct 15 1994 23197 181001 1193818 1990 Interim release to test WWW conversion.
3.2.0 Mar 15 1995 23822 185961 1226358 2031 Spring 1995 update.
3.3.0 Jan 20 1996 24055 187957 1239604 2045 Winter 1996 update.
3.3.1 Jan 25 1996 24147 188728 1244554 2050 Copy-corrected improvement on 3.3.0 shipped to MIT Press as a step towards TNHD III.
4.0.0 Jul 25 1996 24801 193697 1281402 2067 The actual TNHD III version after copy-edit
4.1.0 8 Apr 1999 25777 206825 1359992 2217 The Jargon File rides again after three years.
4.2.0 31 Jan 2000 26598 214639 1412243 2267 Fix processing of URLs.
4.3.0 30 Apr 2001 27805 224978 1480215 2319 Special edition in honor of the first implementation of RFC 1149. Also cleaned up a number of obsolete entries.
4.4.0 10 May 2003 32004 230012 1707139 2290 XML-Docbook format conversion. Serious pruning of old slang, nearly 100 entries failed the Google test and were removed.
4.4.1 13 May 2003 37157 234687 1618716 2290 XML-Docbook format fixes.
4.4.2 22 May 2003 32629 227852 1555125 2290 Fix filename collisions and other small problems.
4.4.3 15 Jul 2003 37363 235135 1629667 2293 Fix some stylesheet problems leading to missing links.
4.4.4 14 Aug 2003 37392 235271 1630579 2295 Corrected build machinery; we can make RPMS now.
4.4.5 4 Oct 2003 37482 235858 1634767 2299 Minor updates. Four new entries and a better original-bug picture.
4.4.6 25 Oct 2003 37560 236406 1638454 2302 Added glider illustration. Amended FUD entry pursuent to SCO's attempt to abuse it.
4.4.7 29 Dec 2003 37666 237206 1643609 2307 Winter 2003 update.
Version numbering: Version numbers should be read as major.minor.revision. Major version 1 is reserved for the 'old' (ITS) Jargon File, jargon-1. Major version 2 encompasses revisions by ESR (Eric S. Raymond) with assistance from GLS (Guy L. Steele, Jr.) leading up to and including the second paper edition. From now on, major version number N.00 will probably correspond to the Nth paper edition. Usually later versions will either completely supersede or incorporate earlier versions, so there is generally no point in keeping old versions around.
Our thanks to the coauthors of Steele-1983 for oversight and assistance, and to the hundreds of Usenetters (too many to name here) who contributed entries and encouragement. More thanks go to several of the old-timers on the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers, who contributed much useful commentary and many corrections and valuable historical perspective: Joseph M. Newcomer
We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished linguists. David Stampe
A few bits of this text quote previous works. We are indebted to Brian A. LaMacchia
It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the major contributions of Mark Brader and Steve Summit
Finally, George V. Reilly
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Chapter 4. Jargon Construction
Part I. Introduction --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 4. Jargon Construction
Table of Contents
Verb Doubling
Soundalike Slang
The -P Convention
Overgeneralization
Spoken inarticulations
Anthropomorphization
Comparatives
There are some standard methods of jargonification that became established quite early (i.e., before 1970), spreading from such sources as the Tech Model Railroad Club, the PDP-1 SPACEWAR hackers, and John McCarthy's original crew of LISPers. These include verb doubling, soundalike slang, the '-P' convention, overgeneralization, spoken inarticulations, and anthropomorphization. Each is discussed below. We also cover the standard comparatives for design quality.
Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization, anthropomorphization, and (especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite general; but soundalike slang is still largely confined to MIT and other large universities, and the '-P' convention is found only where LISPers flourish.
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Verb Doubling
Chapter 4. Jargon Construction --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Verb Doubling
A standard construction in English is to double a verb and use it as an exclamation, such as "Bang, bang!" or "Quack, quack!". Most of these are names for noises. Hackers also double verbs as a concise, sometimes sarcastic comment on what the implied subject does. Also, a doubled verb is often used to terminate a conversation, in the process remarking on the current state of affairs or what the speaker intends to do next. Typical examples involve win, lose, hack, flame, barf, chomp:
"The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose."
"Mostly he talked about his latest crock. Flame, flame."
"Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!
Some verb-doubled constructions have special meanings not immediately obvious from the verb. These have their own listings in the lexicon.
The Usenet culture has one tripling convention unrelated to this; the names of 'joke' topic groups often have a tripled last element. The first and paradigmatic example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork (a Muppet Show reference); other infamous examples have included:
alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg
alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk
sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom
alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill
These two traditions fuse in the newsgroup alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb, devoted to humor based on deliberately confounding parts of speech. Several observers have noted that the contents of this group is excellently representative of the peculiarities of hacker humor.
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Soundalike Slang
Chapter 4. Jargon Construction
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Soundalike Slang
Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered particularly flavorful if the phrase is bent so as to include some other jargon word; thus the computer hobbyist magazine Dr. Dobb's Journal is almost always referred to among hackers as 'Dr. Frob's Journal' or simply 'Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in fairly wide use include names for newspapers:
Boston Herald → Horrid (or Harried)
Boston Globe → Boston Glob
Houston (or San Francisco) Chronicle → the Crocknicle (or the Comical)
New York Times → New York Slime
Wall Street Journal → Wall Street Urinal
However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard examples include:
Data General → Dirty Genitals
IBM 360 → IBM Three-Sickly
Government Property — Do Not Duplicate (on keys) → Government Duplicity — Do Not Propagate
for historical reasons → for hysterical raisins
Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford) → Marginal Hacks Hall
Microsoft → Microsloth
Internet Explorer → Internet Exploiter
FrontPage → AffrontPage
VB.NET → VB Nyet
Lotus Notes → Lotus Bloats
Microsoft Outlook → Microsoft Outhouse
Linux → Linsux
FreeBSD → FreeLSD
C# → C Flat
This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent.
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The -P Convention
Chapter 4. Jargon Construction
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The -P Convention
Turning a word into a question by appending the syllable 'P'; from the LISP convention of appending the letter 'P' to denote a predicate (a boolean-valued function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.)
At dinnertime:
Q: "Foodp?"
A: "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!"
At any time:
Q: "State-of-the-world-P?"
A: (Straight) "I'm about to go home."
A: (Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state."
On the phone to Florida:
Q: "State-p Florida?"
A: "Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?"
[Once, when we were at a Chinese restaurant, Bill Gosper wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" — GLS]
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Overgeneralization
Chapter 4. Jargon Construction
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Overgeneralization
A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the frequency with which techspeak items such as names of program tools, command language primitives, and even assembler opcodes are applied to contexts outside of computing wherever hackers find amusing analogies to them. Thus (to cite one of the best-known examples) Unix hackers often grep for things rather than searching for them. Many of the lexicon entries are generalizations of exactly this kind.
Hackers enjoy overgeneralization on the grammatical level as well. Many hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to nonuniform cases (or vice versa). For example, because porous → porosity and generous → generosity, hackers happily generalize:
mysterious → mysteriosity
ferrous → ferrosity
obvious → obviosity
dubious → dubiosity
Another class of common construction uses the suffix '-itude' to abstract a quality from just about any adjective or noun. This usage arises especially in cases where mainstream English would perform the same abstraction through '-iness' or '-ingness'. Thus:
win → winnitude (a common exclamation)
loss → lossitude
cruft → cruftitude
lame → lameitude
Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation; they argue, for example, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be called 'lats' — after all, they're measuring latitude!
Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: "All nouns can be verbed", "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over", "I'm grepping the files". English as a whole is already heading in this direction (towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese); hackers are simply a bit ahead of the curve.
The suffix "-full" can also be applied in generalized and fanciful ways, as in "As soon as you have more than one cachefull of data, the system starts thrashing," or "As soon as I have more than one headfull of ideas, I start writing it all down." A common use is "screenfull", meaning the amount of text that will fit on one screen, usually in text mode where you have no choice as to character size. Another common form is "bufferfull".
However, hackers avoid the unimaginative verb-making techniques characteristic of marketroids, bean-counters, and the Pentagon; a hacker would never, for example, 'productize', 'prioritize', or 'securitize' things. Hackers have a strong aversion to bureaucratic bafflegab and regard those who use it with contempt.
Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight overgeneralization in modern English; in hackish, however, it is good form to mark them in some standard nonstandard way. Thus:
win → winnitude, winnage
disgust → disgustitude
hack → hackification
Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary includes an entry which implies that the plural of 'mouse' is meeces, and notes that the defined plural of 'caboose' is 'cabeese'. This latter has apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke) among railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years
On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in 'x' may form plurals in '-xen' (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g., 'soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are the Hebrew-style 'frobbotzim' for the plural of 'frobbozz' (see frobnitz) and 'Unices' and 'Twenices' (rather than 'Unixes' and 'Twenexes'; see Unix, TWENEX in main text). But note that 'Twenexen' was never used, and 'Unixen' was seldom sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty years after it might logically have come into use; it has been suggested that this is because '-ix' and '-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is reported that 'comma' and 'semicolon' pluralize as 'commata' and 'semicola' respectively. Finally, it has been suggested to general approval that the plural of 'mongoose' ought to be 'polygoose'.
The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending '-im', or the Anglo-Saxon plural suffix '-en') to cases where it isn't normally considered to apply.
This is not 'poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware of what they are doing when they distort the language. It is grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done not to impress but to amuse, and never at the expense of clarity.
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Spoken inarticulations
Chapter 4. Jargon Construction
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Spoken inarticulations
Words such as 'mumble', 'sigh', and 'groan' are spoken in places where their referent might more naturally be used. It has been suggested that this usage derives from the impossibility of representing such noises on a comm link or in electronic mail, MUDs, and IRC channels (interestingly, the same sorts of constructions have been showing up with increasing frequency in comic strips). Another expression sometimes heard is "Complain!", meaning "I have a complaint!"
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Anthropomorphization
Chapter 4. Jargon Construction
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Anthropomorphization
Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists and academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of behavior to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most hackers anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program behavior in terms of wants and desires.
Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as though it has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires. Thus, one hears "The protocol handler got confused", or that programs "are trying" to do things, or one may say of a routine that "its goal in life is to X". Or: "You can't run those two cards on the same bus; they fight over interrupt 9."
One even hears explanations like "... and its poor little brain couldn't understand X, and it died." Sometimes modelling things this way actually seems to make them easier to understand, perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as 'like a person' rather than 'like a thing'.
At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would use language that seems to ascribe consciousness to them. The mind-set behind this tendency thus demands examination.
The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work on every day are 'alive'. To the contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior.
Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are biological machines — consciousness is an interesting and valuable epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery which is not fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from computers.
Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon and metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a thing 'alive', is information and richness of pattern. This is animism from the flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins and rocks are all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of 'consciousness' according to their information-processing capacity.
Because hackers accept that a human machine can have intentions, it is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to other complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is mechanical, it is neither more or less absurd to say that "The program wants to go into an infinite loop" than it is to say that "I want to go eat some chocolate" — and even defensible to say that "The stone, once dropped, wants to move towards the center of the earth".
This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy. Daniel Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three stances: the "physical stance" (thing-to-be-explained as a physical object), the "design stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an artifact), and the "intentional stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an agent with desires and intentions). Which stances are appropriate is a matter not of abstract truth but of utility. Hackers typically view simple programs from the design stance, but more complex ones are often modelled using the intentional stance.
It has also been argued that the anthropomorphization of software and hardware reflects a blurring of the boundary between the programmer and his artifacts — the human qualities belong to the programmer and the code merely expresses these qualities as his/her proxy. On this view, a hacker saying a piece of code 'got confused' is really saying that he (or she) was confused about exactly what he wanted the computer to do, the code naturally incorporated this confusion, and the code expressed the programmer's confusion when executed by crashing or otherwise misbehaving.
Note that by displacing from "I got confused" to "It got confused", the programmer is not avoiding responsibility, but rather getting some analytical distance in order to be able to consider the bug dispassionately.
It has also been suggested that anthropomorphizing complex systems is actually an expression of humility, a way of acknowleging that simple rules we do understand (or that we invented) can lead to emergent behavioral complexities that we don't completely understand.
All three explanations accurately model hacker psychology, and should be considered complementary rather than competing.
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Comparatives
Chapter 4. Jargon Construction
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Comparatives
Finally, note that many words in hacker jargon have to be understood as members of sets of comparatives. This is especially true of the adjectives and nouns used to describe the beauty and functional quality of code. Here is an approximately correct spectrum:
monstrosity brain-damage screw bug lose misfeature crock kluge hack win feature elegance perfection
The last is spoken of as a mythical absolute, approximated but never actually attained. Another similar scale is used for describing the reliability of software:
broken flaky dodgy fragile brittle solid robust bulletproof armor-plated
Note, however, that 'dodgy' is primarily Commonwealth Hackish (it is rare in the U.S., where 'squirrelly' may be more common) and may change places with 'flaky' for some speakers.
Coinages for describing lossage seem to call forth the very finest in hackish linguistic inventiveness; it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people.
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Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style
Part I. Introduction
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Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells 'wrong' as 'worng'. Others have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) "This sentence no verb", or "Too repetetetive", or "Bad speling", or "Incorrectspa cing." Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often made of phrases relating to confusion or things that are confusing; 'dain bramage' for 'brain damage' is perhaps the most common (similarly, a hacker would be likely to write "Excuse me, I'm cixelsyd today", rather than "I'm dyslexic today"). This sort of thing is quite common and is enjoyed by all concerned.
Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.
Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:
Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".
Standard usage would make this
Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd."
but that would be very bad — because the reader would be prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1), dot repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines!
The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.
Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. Hart's Rules and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors call the hacker-like style 'new' or 'logical' quoting. This returns British English to the style many other languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and German) have been using all along.
Another hacker habit is a tendency to distinguish between 'scare' quotes and 'speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style single quotes for marking and reserve American-style double quotes for actual reports of speech or text included from elsewhere. Interestingly, some authorities describe this as correct general usage, but mainstream American English has gone to using double-quotes indiscriminately enough that hacker usage appears marked [and, in fact, I thought this was a personal quirk of mine until I checked with Usenet —ESR] One further permutation that is definitely not standard is a hackish tendency to do marking quotes by using apostrophes (single quotes) in pairs; that is, 'like this'. This is modelled on string and character literal syntax in some programming languages (reinforced by the fact that many character-only terminals display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a vertical single quote).
One quirk that shows up frequently in the email style of Unix hackers in particular is a tendency for some things that are normally all-lowercase (including usernames and the names of commands and C routines) to remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the beginning of sentences. It is clear that, for many hackers, the case of such identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation (the 'spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and confusing them can lead to lossage). A way of escaping this dilemma is simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning of sentences.
There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to the effect that precision of expression is more important than conformance to traditional rules; where the latter create ambiguity or lose information they can be discarded without a second thought. It is notable in this respect that other hackish inventions (for example, in vocabulary) also tend to carry very precise shades of meaning even when constructed to appear slangy and loose. In fact, to a hacker, the contrast between 'loose' form and 'tight' content in jargon is a substantial part of its humor!
Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and emphasis conventions adapted to single-font all-ASCII communications links, and these are occasionally carried over into written documents even when normal means of font changes, underlining, and the like are available.
One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS 'LOUD', and this becomes such an ingrained synesthetic reflex that a person who goes to caps-lock while in talk mode may be asked to "stop shouting, please, you're hurting my ears!".
Also, it is common to use bracketing with unusual characters to signify emphasis. The asterisk is most common, as in "What the *hell*?" even though this interferes with the common use of the asterisk suffix as a footnote mark. The underscore is also common, suggesting underlining (this is particularly common with book titles; for example, "It is often alleged that Joe Haldeman wrote _The_Forever_War_ as a rebuttal to Robert Heinlein's earlier novel of the future military, _Starship_Troopers_."). Other forms exemplified by "=hell=", "\hell/", or "/hell/" are occasionally seen (it's claimed that in the last example the first slash pushes the letters over to the right to make them italic, and the second keeps them from falling over). On FidoNet, you might see #bright# and ^dark^ text, which was actually interpreted by some reader software. Finally, words may also be emphasized L I K E T H I S, or by a series of carets (^) under them on the next line of the text.
There is a semantic difference between *emphasis like this* (which emphasizes the phrase as a whole), and *emphasis* *like* *this* (which suggests the writer speaking very slowly and distinctly, as if to a very young child or a mentally impaired person). Bracketing a word with the '*' character may also indicate that the writer wishes readers to consider that an action is taking place or that a sound is being made. Examples: *bang*, *hic*, *ring*, *grin*, *kick*, *stomp*, *mumble*.
One might also see the above sound effects as
Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term stands for some random member of a larger class (this is straight from BNF). Examples like the following are common:
So this
There is also an accepted convention for 'writing under erasure'; the text>
Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ.
reads roughly as "Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...", with irony emphasized. The digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace, and was actually very visible on old-style printing terminals. As the text was being composed the characters would be echoed and printed immediately, and when a correction was made the backspace keystrokes would be echoed with the string '^H'. Of course, the final composed text would have no trace of the backspace characters (or the original erroneous text).
Accidental writing under erasure occurs when using the Unix talk program to chat interactively to another user. On a PC-style keyboard most users instinctively press the backspace key to delete mistakes, but this may not achieve the desired effect, and merely displays a ^H symbol. The user typically presses backspace a few times before their brain realises the problem — especially likely if the user is a touch-typist — and since each character is transmitted as soon as it is typed, Freudian slips and other inadvertent admissions are (barring network delays) clearly visible for the other user to see.
Deliberate use of ^H for writing under erasure parallels (and may have been influenced by) the ironic use of 'slashouts' in science-fiction fanzines.
A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to previous text. This custom faded in email as more mailers got good editing capabilities, only to take on new life on IRCs and other line-based chat systems.
charlie: I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.lisa: Send it to Erik for the File.lisa: Oops...s/Erik/Eric/.
The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding". This syntax is borrowed from the Unix editing tools ed and sed, but is widely recognized by non-Unix hackers as well.
In a formula, * signifies multiplication but two asterisks in a row are a shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN, and is also used in Ada). Thus, one might write 2 ** 8 = 256.
Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently uses the caret (^, ASCII 1011110); one might write instead 2^8 = 256. This goes all the way back to Algol-60, which used the archaic ASCII 'up-arrow' that later became the caret; this was picked up by Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC, which in turn influenced the design of the bc(1) and dc(1) Unix tools, which have probably done most to reinforce the convention on Usenet. (TeX math mode also uses ^ for exponention.) The notation is mildly confusing to C programmers, because ^ means bitwise exclusive-or in C. Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of Usenet. It is used consistently in this lexicon.
In on-line exchanges, hackers tend to use decimal forms or improper fractions ('3.5' or '7/2') rather than 'typewriter style' mixed fractions ('3-1/2'). The major motive here is probably that the former are more readable in a monospaced font, together with a desire to avoid the risk that the latter might be read as 'three minus one-half'. The decimal form is definitely preferred for fractions with a terminating decimal representation; there may be some cultural influence here from the high status of scientific notation.
Another on-line convention, used especially for very large or very small numbers, is taken from C (which derived it from FORTRAN). This is a form of 'scientific notation' using 'e' to replace '*10^'; for example, one year is about 3e7 (that is, 3 × 10 7) seconds long.
The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of 'approximately'; that is, ~50 means 'about fifty'.
On Usenet and in the MUD world, common C boolean, logical, and relational operators such as |, &, ||, &&, !, ==, !=, >, <, >=, and <= are often combined with English. The Pascal not-equals, <>, is also recognized, and occasionally one sees /= for not-equals (from Ada, Common Lisp, and Fortran 90). The use of prefix '!' as a loose synonym for 'not-' or 'no-' is particularly common; thus, '!clue' is read 'no-clue' or 'clueless'.
A related practice borrows syntax from preferred programming languages to express ideas in a natural-language text. For example, one might see the following:
In
In the above, the #ifdef/#endif pair is a conditional compilation syntax from C; here, it implies that the text between (which is a flame) should be evaluated only if you have turned on (or defined on) the switch FLAME. The #include at the end is C for "include standard disclaimer here"; the 'standard disclaimer' is understood to read, roughly, "These are my personal opinions and not to be construed as the official position of my employer."
The top section in the example, with < at the left margin, is an example of an inclusion convention we'll discuss below.
More recently, following on the huge popularity of the World Wide Web, pseudo-HTML markup has become popular for similar purposes:
You'll even see this with an HTML-style attribute modifier:
Another recent (late 1990s) construction now common on Usenet seems to be borrowed from Unix shell syntax or Perl. It consists of using a dollar sign before an uppercased form of a word or acronym to suggest any random member of the class indicated by the word. Thus: '$PHB' means "any random member of the class 'Pointy-Haired Boss'".
Hackers also mix letters and numbers more freely than in mainstream usage. In particular, it is good hackish style to write a digit sequence where you intend the reader to understand the text string that names that number in English. So, hackers prefer to write '1970s' rather than 'nineteen-seventies' or '1970's' (the latter looks like a possessive).
It should also be noted that hackers exhibit much less reluctance to use multiply-nested parentheses than is normal in English. Part of this is almost certainly due to influence from LISP (which uses deeply nested parentheses (like this (see?)) in its syntax a lot), but it has also been suggested that a more basic hacker trait of enjoying playing with complexity and pushing systems to their limits is in operation.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that many studies of on-line communication have shown that electronic links have a de-inhibiting effect on people. Deprived of the body-language cues through which emotional state is expressed, people tend to forget everything about other parties except what is presented over that ASCII link. This has both good and bad effects. A good one is that it encourages honesty and tends to break down hierarchical authority relationships; a bad one is that it may encourage depersonalization and gratuitous rudeness. Perhaps in response to this, experienced netters often display a sort of conscious formal politesse in their writing that has passed out of fashion in other spoken and written media (for example, the phrase "Well said, sir!" is not uncommon).
Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person communicate with considerable fluency over the net, perhaps precisely because they can forget on an unconscious level that they are dealing with people and thus don't feel stressed and anxious as they would face to face.
Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters for poor spelling or grammar, the network places a premium on literacy and clarity of expression. It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal letters as art.
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Chapter 6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions
Part I. Introduction
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Chapter 6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions
One area where conventions for on-line writing are still in some flux is the marking of included material from earlier messages — what would be called 'block quotations' in ordinary English. From the usual typographic convention employed for these (smaller font at an extra indent), there derived a practice of included text being indented by one ASCII TAB (0001001) character, which under Unix and many other environments gives the appearance of an 8-space indent.
Early mail and netnews readers had no facility for including messages this way, so people had to paste in copy manually. BSD Mail(1) was the first message agent to support inclusion, and early Usenetters emulated its style. But the TAB character tended to push included text too far to the right (especially in multiply nested inclusions), leading to ugly wraparounds. After a brief period of confusion (during which an inclusion leader consisting of three or four spaces became established in EMACS and a few mailers), the use of leading > or > became standard, perhaps owing to its use in ed(1) to display tabs (alternatively, it may derive from the > that some early Unix mailers used to quote lines starting with "From" in text, so they wouldn't look like the beginnings of new message headers). Inclusions within inclusions keep their > leaders, so the 'nesting level' of a quotation is visually apparent.
The practice of including text from the parent article when posting a followup helped solve what had been a major nuisance on Usenet: the fact that articles do not arrive at different sites in the same order. Careless posters used to post articles that would begin with, or even consist entirely of, "No, that's wrong" or "I agree" or the like. It was hard to see who was responding to what. Consequently, around 1984, new news-posting software evolved a facility to automatically include the text of a previous article, marked with "> " or whatever the poster chose. The poster was expected to delete all but the relevant lines. The result has been that, now, careless posters post articles containing the entire text of a preceding article, followed only by "No, that's wrong" or "I agree".
Many people feel that this cure is worse than the original disease, and there soon appeared newsreader software designed to let the reader skip over included text if desired. Today, some posting software rejects articles containing too high a proportion of lines beginning with '>' — but this too has led to undesirable workarounds, such as the deliberate inclusion of zero-content filler lines which aren't quoted and thus pull the message below the rejection threshold.
Inclusion practice is still evolving, and disputes over the 'correct' inclusion style occasionally lead to holy wars.
Most netters view an inclusion as a promise that comment on it will immediately follow. The preferred, conversational style looks like this,
> relevant excerpt 1
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 2
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 3
response to excerpt
or for short messages like this:
> entire message
response to message
Thanks to poor design of some PC-based mail agents (notably Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express), one will occasionally see the entire quoted message after the response, like this
response to message
> entire message
but this practice is strongly deprecated.
Though > remains the standard inclusion leader, | is occasionally used for extended quotations where original variations in indentation are being retained (one mailer even combines these and uses |>). One also sees different styles of quoting a number of authors in the same message: one (deprecated because it loses information) uses a leader of > for everyone, another (the most common) is > > > > , > > > , etc. (or >>>> , >>>, etc., depending on line length and nesting depth) reflecting the original order of messages, and yet another is to use a different citation leader for each author, say > , : , | , @ (preserving nesting so that the inclusion order of messages is still apparent, or tagging the inclusions with authors' names). Yet another style is to use each poster's initials (or login name) as a citation leader for that poster.
Occasionally one sees a # leader used for quotations from authoritative sources such as standards documents; the intended allusion is to the root prompt (the special Unix command prompt issued when one is running as the privileged super-user).
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Chapter 7. Hacker Speech Style
Part I. Introduction
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Chapter 7. Hacker Speech Style
Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful word choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively little use of contractions or street slang. Dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued — but an underlying seriousness and intelligence are essential. One should use just enough jargon to communicate precisely and identify oneself as a member of the culture; overuse of jargon or a breathless, excessively gung-ho attitude is considered tacky and the mark of a loser.
This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical fields. In contrast with the methods of jargon construction, it is fairly constant throughout hackerdom.
It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative questions — or, at least, that the people to whom they are talking are often confused by the sense of their answers. The problem is that they have done so much programming that distinguishes between
if (going) ...
and
if (!going) ...
that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it may seem to be asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so to merit an answer in the opposite sense. This confuses English-speaking non-hackers because they were taught to answer as though the negative part weren't there. In some other languages (including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese) the hackish interpretation is standard and the problem wouldn't arise. Hackers often find themselves wishing for a word like French 'si', German 'doch', or Dutch 'jawel' — a word with which one could unambiguously answer 'yes' to a negative question. (See also mu)
For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows them. The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to disturb them.
In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering questions containing logical connectives with a strictly literal rather than colloquial interpretation. A non-hacker who is indelicate enough to ask a question like "So, are you working on finding that bug now or leaving it until later?" is likely to get the perfectly correct answer "Yes!" (that is, "Yes, I'm doing it either now or later, and you didn't ask which!").
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Chapter 8. International Style
Part I. Introduction
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Chapter 8. International Style
Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage in American English, we have made some effort to get input from abroad. Though the hacker-speak of other languages often uses translations of jargon from English (often as transmitted to them by earlier Jargon File versions!), the local variations are interesting, and knowledge of them may be of some use to travelling hackers.
There are some references herein to 'Commonwealth hackish'. These are intended to describe some variations in hacker usage as reported in the English spoken in Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, India, etc. — though Canada is heavily influenced by American usage). There is also an entry on Commonwealth Hackish reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary differences from U.S. hackish.
Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report that they often use a mixture of English and their native languages for technical conversation. Occasionally they develop idioms in their English usage that are influenced by their native-language styles. Some of these are reported here.
On the other hand, English often gives rise to grammatical and vocabulary mutations in the native language. For example, Italian hackers often use the nonexistent verbs 'scrollare' (to scroll) and 'deletare' (to delete) rather than native Italian scorrere and cancellare. Similarly, the English verb 'to hack' has been seen conjugated in Swedish. In German, many Unix terms in English are casually declined as if they were German verbs -- thus: mount/mounten/gemountet; grep/grepen/gegrept; fork/forken/geforkt; core dump/core-dumpen, gecoredumpt. And Spanish-speaking hackers use 'linkear' (to link), 'debugear' (to debug), and 'lockear' (to lock).
European hackers report that this happens partly because the English terms make finer distinctions than are available in their native vocabularies, and partly because deliberate language-crossing makes for amusing wordplay.
A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they are parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to English-speakers.
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Chapter 9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
Part I. Introduction
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Chapter 9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of 'pirate boards' inhabited by crackers, phone phreaks, and warez d00dz. These people (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang. While BBS technology essentially died out after the Great Internet Explosion, the cracker culture moved to IRC and other Internet-based network channels and maintained a semi-underground existence.
Though crackers often call themselves 'hackers', they aren't (they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems). Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's, and hackers regard them with varying degrees of contempt. But ten years on the brightest crackers tend to become hackers, and sometimes to recall their origins by using cracker slang in a marked and heavily ironic way.
This lexicon covers much of cracker slang (which is often called "leet-speak") so the reader will be able to understand both what leaks out of the cracker underground and the occasional ironic use by hackers.
Here is a brief guide to cracker and warez d00dz usage:
Misspell frequently. The substitutions phone → fone and freak → phreak are obligatory.
Always substitute 'z's for 's's. (i.e. "codes" → "codez"). The substitution of 'z' for 's' has evolved so that a 'z' is now systematically put at the end of words to denote an illegal or cracking connection. Examples : Appz, passwordz, passez, utilz, MP3z, distroz, pornz, sitez, gamez, crackz, serialz, downloadz, FTPz, etc.
Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey Dudes!#!$#$!#!$").
Use the emphatic 'k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome") frequently.
Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").
TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE TIME.
The following letter substitutions are common:
a → 4
e → 3
f → ph
i → 1 or |
l → | or 1
m → |\/|
n → |\|
o → 0
s → 5
t → 7 or +
Thus, "elite" comes out "31337" and "all your base are belong to us" becomes "4ll y0ur b4s3 4r3 b3l0ng t0 us", Other less common substitutions include:
b → 8
c → ( or k or |< or /<
d → <|
g → 6 or 9
h → |-|
k → |< or /<
p → |2
u → |_|
v → / or \/
w → // or \/\/
x → ><
y → '/
The word "cool" is spelled "kewl" and normally used ironically; when crackers really want to praise something they use the prefix "uber" (from German) which comes out "ub3r" or even "|_|83r"
These traits are similar to those of B1FF, who originated as a parody of naive BBS users; also of his latter-day equivalent Jeff K.. Occasionally, this sort of distortion may be used as heavy sarcasm or ironically by a real hacker, as in:
> I got X Windows running under Linux!d00d! u R an 31337 hax0r
The words "hax0r" for "hacker" and "sux0r" for "sucks" are the most common references; more generally, to mark a term as cracker-speak one may add "0r" or "xor". Examples:
"The nightly build is sux0r today."
"Gotta go reboot those b0x0rz."
"Man, I really ought to fix0r my .fetchmailrc."
"Yeah, well he's a 'leet VMS operat0r now, so he's too good for us."
The only practice resembling this in native hacker usage is the substitution of a dollar sign of 's' in names of products or service felt to be excessively expensive, e.g. Compu$erve, Micro$oft.
For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see lamer, elite, leech, poser, cracker, and especially warez d00dz, banner site, ratio site, leech mode.
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Chapter 10. Pronunciation Guide
Part I. Introduction
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Chapter 10. Pronunciation Guide
Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all entries that are neither dictionary words pronounced as in standard English nor obvious compounds thereof. Slashes bracket phonetic pronunciations, which are to be interpreted using the following conventions:
Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or back-accent follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks a secondary accent in some words of four or more syllables). If no accent is given, the word is pronounced with equal accentuation on all syllables (this is common for abbreviations).
Consonants are pronounced as in American English. The letter 'g' is always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); 'ch' is soft ("church" rather than "chemist"). The letter 'j' is the sound that occurs twice in "judge". The letter 's' is always as in "pass", never a z sound. The digraph 'kh' is the guttural of "loch" or "l'chaim". The digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of "bughouse" or "ragheap" (rare in English).
Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names; thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/. /Z/ may be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.
Vowels are represented as follows:
Table 10.1. Vowels
a back, that
ah father, palm (see note)
ar far, mark
aw flaw, caught
ay bake, rain
e less, men
ee easy, ski
eir their, software
i trip, hit
i: life, sky
o block, stock (see note)
oh flow, sew
oo loot, through
or more, door
ow out, how
oy boy, coin
uh but, some
u put, foot
y yet, young
yoo few, chew
[y]oo /oo/ with optional fronting as in 'news' (/nooz/ or /nyooz/)
The glyph /@/ is used for the 'schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded vowels.
The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, 'kitten' and 'color' would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not /kit'@n/ and /kuhl'@r/.
Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found in standard American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken by TV network announcers and typical of educated speech in the Upper Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia). However, we separate /o/ from /ah/, which tend to merge in standard American. This may help readers accustomed to accents resembling British Received Pronunciation.
The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as possible to map the pronunciations into their local dialect by ignoring some subset of the distinctions we make. Speakers of British RP, for example, can smash terminal /r/ and all unstressed vowels. Speakers of many varieties of southern American will automatically map /o/ to /aw/; and so forth. (Standard American makes a good reference dialect for this purpose because it has crisp consonants and more vowel distinctions than other major dialects, and tends to retain distinctions between unstressed vowels. It also happens to be what your editor speaks.)
Entries with a pronunciation of '//' are written-only usages. (No, Unix weenies, this does not mean 'pronounce like previous pronunciation'!)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 11. Other Lexicon Conventions
Part I. Introduction
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 11. Other Lexicon Conventions
Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than the letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common in mainstream dictionaries), except that all entries beginning with nonalphabetic characters are sorted before A, except that leading dash is ignored. The case-blindness is a feature, not a bug.
Prefix ** is used as linguists do; to mark examples of incorrect usage.
We follow the 'logical' quoting convention described in the Writing Style section above. In addition, we reserve double quotes for actual excerpts of text or (sometimes invented) speech. Scare quotes (which mark a word being used in a nonstandard way), and philosopher's quotes (which turn an utterance into the string of letters or words that name it) are both rendered with single quotes.
References such as malloc(3) and patch(1) are to Unix facilities (some of which, such as patch(1), are actually open source distributed over Usenet). The Unix manuals use foo(n) to refer to item foo in section (n) of the manual, where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is games, and n=8 (where present) is system administration utilities. Sections 4, 5, and 7 of the manuals have changed roles frequently and in any case are not referred to in any of the entries.
Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are summarized here:
Table 11.1. Abbreviations
abbrev. abbreviation
adj. adjective
adv. adverb
alt. alternate
cav. caveat
conj. conjunction
esp. especially
excl. exclamation
imp. imperative
interj. interjection
n. noun
obs. obsolete
pl. plural
poss. possibly
pref. prefix
prob. probably
prov. proverbial
quant. quantifier
suff. suffix
syn. synonym (or synonymous with)
v. verb (may be transitive or intransitive)
var. variant
vi. intransitive verb
vt. transitive verb
Where alternate spellings or pronunciations are given, alt. separates two possibilities with nearly equal distribution, while var. prefixes one that is markedly less common than the primary.
Where a term can be attributed to a particular subculture or is known to have originated there, we have tried to so indicate. Here is a list of abbreviations used in etymologies:
Table 11.2. Origins
Amateur Packet Radio A technical culture of ham-radio sites using AX.25 and TCP/IP for wide-area networking and BBS systems.
Berkeley University of California at Berkeley
BBN Bolt, Beranek & Newman
Cambridge the university in England (not the city in Massachusetts where MIT happens to be located!)
CMU Carnegie-Mellon University
Commodore Commodore Business Machines
DEC The Digital Equipment Corporation (now HP).
Fairchild The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto development group
FidoNet See the FidoNet entry
IBM International Business Machines
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology; esp. the legendary MIT AI Lab culture of roughly 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups, including the Tech Model Railroad Club
NRL Naval Research Laboratories
NYU New York University
OED The Oxford English Dictionary
Purdue Purdue University
SAIL Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (at Stanford University)
SI From Système International, the name for the standard abbreviations of metric nomenclature used in the sciences
Stanford Stanford University
Sun Sun Microsystems
TMRC Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at MIT c. 1960. Material marked TMRC is from An Abridged Dictionary of the TMRC Language, originally compiled by Pete Samson in 1959
UCLA University of California, Los Angeles
UK the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland)
Usenet See the Usenet entry
WPI Worcester Polytechnic Institute, site of a very active community of PDP-10 hackers during the 1970s
WWW The World-Wide-Web.
XEROX PARC XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering research in user interface design and networking
Yale Yale University
Other etymology abbreviations such as Unix and PDP-10 refer to technical cultures surrounding specific operating systems, processors, or other environments. The fact that a term is labelled with any one of these abbreviations does not necessarily mean its use is confined to that culture. In particular, many terms labelled 'MIT' and 'Stanford' are in quite general use. We have tried to give some indication of the distribution of speakers in the usage notes; however, a number of factors mentioned in the introduction conspire to make these indications less definite than might be desirable.
A few new definitions attached to entries are marked [proposed]. These are usually generalizations suggested by editors or Usenet respondents in the process of commenting on previous definitions of those entries. These are not represented as established jargon.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 12. Format for New Entries
Prev Part I. Introduction Next
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Chapter 12. Format for New Entries
We welcome new jargon, and corrections to or amplifications of existing entries. You can improve your submission's chances of being included by adding background information on user population and years of currency. References to actual usage via URLs and/or Google pointers are particularly welcomed.
All contributions and suggestions about the Jargon File will be considered donations to be placed in the public domain as part of this File, and may be used in subsequent paper editions. Submissions may be edited for accuracy, clarity and concision.
We are looking to expand the File's range of technical specialties covered. There are doubtless rich veins of jargon yet untapped in the scientific computing, graphics, and networking hacker communities; also in numerical analysis, computer architectures and VLSI design, language design, and many other related fields. Send us your jargon!
We are not interested in straight technical terms explained by textbooks or technical dictionaries unless an entry illuminates 'underground' meanings or aspects not covered by official histories. We are also not interested in 'joke' entries — there is a lot of humor in the file but it must flow naturally out of the explanations of what hackers do and how they think.
It is OK to submit items of jargon you have originated if they have spread to the point of being used by people who are not personally acquainted with you. We prefer items to be attested by independent submission from two different sites.
The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and made available for browsing on the World Wide Web, and will include a version number. Read it, pass it around, contribute — this is your monument!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part II. The Jargon Lexicon
Prev Next
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The Jargon Lexicon
The Crunchly saga begins here.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-18.)
The infamous Crunchly cartoons by The Great Quux are woven into the lexicon, each next to an appropriate entry. To read them in the sequence in which they were written, chase pointers from here using the 'next cartoon' information in the captions. A few don't have next pointers; these are vignettes from the 1973 Crunchland tableau spread that inaugurated the strip.
Here is a framed version of the glossary.
Table of Contents
Glossary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Glossary
Prev Part II. The Jargon Lexicon Next
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Glossary
0
(TM)
/dev/null
/me
0
1TBS
2
404
404 compliant
@-party
A
abbrev
ABEND
accumulator
ACK
Acme
ad-hockery
address harvester
adger
admin
ADVENT
adware
AFAIK
AFJ
AFK
AI
AI-complete
airplane rule
Alderson loop
aliasing bug
Alice and Bob
All hardware sucks, all software sucks.
all your base are belong to us
alpha geek
alpha particles
alt
alt bit
Aluminum Book
ambimouseterous
Amiga
Amiga Persecution Complex
amp off
amper
and there was much rejoicing
Angband
angle brackets
angry fruit salad
annoybot
annoyware
ANSI standard
ANSI standard pizza
anti-idiotarianism
AOL!
app
Archimedes
arena
arg
ARMM
armor-plated
asbestos
asbestos cork award
asbestos longjohns
ASCII
ASCII art
ASCIIbetical order
astroturfing
atomic
attoparsec
Aunt Tillie
AUP
autobogotiphobia
autoconfiscate
automagically
avatar
awk
B
B1FF
B5
back door
backbone cabal
backbone site
backgammon
background
backreference
backronym
backward combatability
BAD
Bad and Wrong
Bad Thing
bag on the side
bagbiter
bagbiting
baggy pantsing
balloonian variable
bamf
banana problem
bandwidth
bang
bang on
bang path
banner
banner ad
banner site
bar
bare metal
barf
barfmail
barfulation
barfulous
barn
barney
baroque
BASIC
batbelt
batch
bathtub curve
Batman factor
baud
baz
bazaar
bboard
BBS
BCPL
BDFL
beam
beanie key
beep
Befunge
beige toaster
bells and whistles
bells whistles and gongs
benchmark
Berkeley Quality Software
Berzerkeley
beta
BFI
BI
bible
BiCapitalization
biff
big iron
Big Red Switch
Big Room
big win
big-endian
bignum
bigot
bikeshedding
binary four
bit
bit bang
bit bashing
bit bucket
bit decay
bit rot
bit twiddling
bit-paired keyboard
bitblt
bits
bitty box
bixie
black art
black hat
black hole
black magic
Black Screen of Death
blammo
blargh
blast
blat
bletch
bletcherous
blinkenlights
blit
blitter
blivet
bloatware
BLOB
block
blog
Bloggs Family
blogosphere
blogrolling
blow an EPROM
blow away
blow out
blow past
blow up
BLT
blue box
Blue Glue
blue goo
Blue Screen of Death
blue wire
blurgle
BNF
boa
board
boat anchor
bob
bodge
BOF
BOFH
bogo-sort
bogometer
BogoMIPS
bogon
bogon filter
bogon flux
bogosity
bogotify
bogue out
bogus
Bohr bug
boink
bomb
bondage-and-discipline language
bonk/oif
book titles
boot
Borg
borken
bot
bottom feeder
bottom-post
bottom-up implementation
bounce
bounce message
boustrophedon
box
boxed comments
boxen
boxology
bozotic
brain dump
brain fart
brain-damaged
brain-dead
braino
brainwidth
bread crumbs
break
break-even point
breath-of-life packet
breedle
Breidbart Index
brick
bricktext
bring X to its knees
brittle
broadcast storm
broken
broken arrow
broken-ring network
BrokenWindows
broket
Brooks's Law
brown-paper-bag bug
browser
BRS
brute force
brute force and ignorance
BSD
BSOD
BUAF
BUAG
bubble sort
bucky bits
buffer chuck
buffer overflow
bug
bug-compatible
bug-for-bug compatible
bug-of-the-month club
bulletproof
bullschildt
bump
burble
buried treasure
burn a CD
burn-in period
burst page
busy-wait
buzz
buzzword-compliant
BWQ
by hand
byte
byte sex
bytesexual
Bzzzt! Wrong.
C
C
C Programmer's Disease
C&C
C++
calculator
Camel Book
camelCase
camelCasing
can't happen
cancelbot
Cancelmoose[tm]
candygrammar
canonical
careware
cargo cult programming
cascade
case and paste
case mod
casters-up mode
casting the runes
cat
catatonic
cathedral
cd tilde
CDA
cdr
chad
chad box
chain
chainik
channel
channel hopping
channel op
chanop
char
charityware
chase pointers
chawmp
check
cheerfully
chemist
Chernobyl chicken
Chernobyl packet
chicken head
chickenboner
chiclet keyboard
Chinese Army technique
choad
choke
chomp
chomper
CHOP
Christmas tree
Christmas tree packet
chrome
chug
Church of the SubGenius
CI$
Cinderella Book
Classic C
clean
click of death
CLM
clobber
clock
clocks
clone
clone-and-hack coding
clover key
clue-by-four
clustergeeking
co-lo
coaster
coaster toaster
COBOL
COBOL fingers
cobweb site
code
code grinder
code monkey
Code of the Geeks
code police
codes
codewalker
coefficient of X
cokebottle
cold boot
COME FROM
comm mode
command key
comment out
Commonwealth Hackish
compact
compiler jock
compo
compress
Compu$erve
computer confetti
computron
con
condition out
condom
confuser
connector conspiracy
cons
considered harmful
console
console jockey
content-free
control-C
control-O
control-Q
control-S
Conway's Law
cookbook
cooked mode
cookie
cookie bear
cookie file
cookie jar
cookie monster
copious free time
copper
copy protection
copybroke
copycenter
copyleft
copyparty
copywronged
core
core cancer
core dump
core leak
Core Wars
cosmic rays
cough and die
courier
cow orker
cowboy
CP/M
CPU Wars
crack
crack root
cracker
cracking
crank
crapplet
CrApTeX
crash
crash and burn
crawling horror
CRC handbook
creationism
creep
creeping elegance
creeping featurism
creeping featuritis
cretin
cretinous
crippleware
critical mass
crlf
crock
cross-post
crossload
crudware
cruft
cruft together
cruftsmanship
crufty
crumb
crunch
cryppie
cthulhic
CTSS
cube
cup holder
cursor dipped in X
cuspy
cut a tape
cybercrud
cyberpunk
cyberspace
cycle
cycle of reincarnation
cycle server
cypherpunk
C|N>K
D
daemon
daemon book
dahmum
dancing frog
dangling pointer
dark-side hacker
Datamation
DAU
Dave the Resurrector
day mode
dd
DDT
de-rezz
dead
dead beef attack
dead code
dead-tree version
DEADBEEF
deadlock
deadly embrace
death code
Death Square
Death Star
Death, X of
DEC
DEC Wars
decay
deckle
DED
deep hack mode
deep magic
deep space
defenestration
defined as
deflicted
dehose
Dejagoo
deletia
deliminator
delint
delta
demented
demigod
demo
demo mode
demoeffect
demogroup
demon
demon dialer
demoparty
demoscene
dentro
depeditate
deprecated
derf
deserves to lose
despew
dickless workstation
dictionary flame
diddle
die
die horribly
diff
dike
Dilbert
ding
dink
dinosaur
dinosaur pen
dinosaurs mating
dirtball
dirty power
disclaimer
Discordianism
disemvowel
disk farm
display hack
dispress
Dissociated Press
distribution
distro
disusered
DMZ
do protocol
doc
documentation
dodgy
dogcow
dogfood
dogpile
dogwash
Don't do that then!
dongle
dongle-disk
Doom, X of
doorstop
DoS attack
dot file
double bucky
doubled sig
down
download
DP
DPer
Dr. Fred Mbogo
dragon
Dragon Book
drain
dread high-bit disease
dread questionmark disease
DRECNET
driver
droid
drone
drool-proof paper
drop on the floor
drop-ins
drop-outs
drugged
drum
drunk mouse syndrome
DSW
dub dub dub
Duff's device
dumb terminal
dumbass attack
dumbed down
dump
dumpster diving
dusty deck
DWIM
dynner
E
Easter egg
Easter egging
eat flaming death
EBCDIC
ECP
ed
egg
egosurf
eighty-column mind
El Camino Bignum
elder days
elegant
elephantine
elevator controller
elite
ELIZA effect
elvish
EMACS
emoticon
EMP
empire
engine
English
enhancement
ENQ
EOD
EOF
EOL
EOU
epoch
epsilon
epsilon squared
era
Eric Conspiracy
Eris
erotics
error 33
eurodemo
evil
evil and rude
Evil Empire
exa-
examining the entrails
EXCH
excl
EXE
exec
exercise, left as an
Exon
Exploder
exploit
external memory
eye candy
eyeball search
F
face time
factor
fairings
fall over
fall through
fan
fandango on core
FAQ
FAQ list
FAQL
faradize
farkled
farm
fascist
fat electrons
fat pipe
fat-finger
faulty
fear and loathing
feature
feature creature
feature creep
feature key
feature shock
featurectomy
feep
feeper
feeping creature
feeping creaturism
feetch feetch
fence
fencepost error
fiber-seeking backhoe
FidoNet
field circus
field servoid
file signature
filk
film at 11
filter
Finagle's Law
fine
finger
finger trouble
finger-pointing syndrome
finn
firebottle
firefighting
firehose syndrome
firewall code
firewall machine
fireworks mode
firmware
fish
FISH queue
fisking
FITNR
fix
FIXME
flag
flag day
flaky
flamage
flame
flame bait
flame on
flame war
flamer
flap
flarp
flash crowd
flat
flat-ASCII
flat-file
flatten
flavor
flavorful
flippy
flood
flowchart
flower key
flush
flypage
Flyspeck 3
flytrap
FM
fnord
FOAF
FOD
fold case
followup
fontology
foo
foobar
fool
fool file
Foonly
footprint
for free
for the rest of us
for values of
fora
foreground
fork
fork bomb
forked
Formosa's Law
Fortrash
fortune cookie
forum
fossil
four-color glossies
frag
fragile
Frankenputer
fred
Fred Foobar
frednet
free software
freeware
freeze
fried
frink
friode
fritterware
frob
frobnicate
frobnitz
frog
frogging
front end
frotz
frotzed
frowney
FRS
fry
fscking
FSF
-fu
FUBAR
fuck me harder
FUD
FUD wars
fudge
fudge factor
fuel up
Full Monty
fum
functino
funky
funny money
furrfu
G
G
gang bang
Gang of Four
garbage collect
garply
gas
Gates's Law
gawble
GC
GCOS
GECOS
gedanken
geef
geek
geek code
geek out
geekasm
gen
gender mender
General Public Virus
generate
Genius From Mars Technique
gensym
Get a life!
Get a real computer!
GandhiCon
gib
GIFs at 11
gig
giga-
GIGO
gilley
gillion
ginger
GIPS
GIYF
glark
glass
glass tty
glassfet
glitch
glob
glork
glue
gnarly
GNU
gnubie
GNUMACS
go flatline
go gold
go root
go-faster stripes
GoAT
goat file
gobble
Godwin's Law
Godzillagram
golden
golf-ball printer
gonk
gonkulator
gonzo
Good Thing
google juice
gopher
gopher hole
gorets
gorilla arm
gorp
GOSMACS
gotcha
GPL
GPV
gray goo
gray hat
Great Internet Explosion
Great Renaming
Great Runes
Great Worm
great-wall
green bytes
green card
green lightning
green machine
Green's Theorem
greenbar
grep
gribble
grilf
grind
grind crank
gritch
grok
gronk
gronk out
gronked
grovel
grue
grunge
gubbish
Guido
guiltware
gumby
gunch
gunpowder chicken
guru
guru meditation
gweep
GWF
H
h
ha ha only serious
hack
hack attack
hack mode
hack on
hack together
hack up
hack value
hacked off
hacked up
hacker
hacker ethic
hacker humor
Hackers (the movie)
hacking run
Hacking X for Y
Hackintosh
hackish
hackishness
hackitude
hair
hairball
hairy
HAKMEM
hakspek
Halloween Documents
ham
hammer
hamster
HAND
hand cruft
hand-hacking
hand-roll
handle
handshaking
handwave
hang
Hanlon's Razor
happily
hard boot
hardcoded
hardwarily
hardwired
has the X nature
hash bucket
hash collision
hat
HCF
heads down
heartbeat
heatseeker
heavy metal
heavy wizardry
heavyweight
Hed Rat
heisenbug
hell desk
hello sailor!
hello world
hello, wall!
hex
hexadecimal
hexit
HHOK
HHOS
hidden flag
high bit
high moby
highly
hing
hired gun
hirsute
HLL
hoarding
hog
hole
hollised
holy penguin pee
holy wars
home box
home machine
home page
honey pot
hook
hop
horked
hose
hosed
hot chat
hot spot
hotlink
house wizard
HP-SUX
HTH
huff
hung
hungry puppy
hungus
hyperspace
hysterical reasons
I
I didn't change anything!
I see no X here.
I for one welcome our new X overlords
IANAL
IBM
ICBM address
ice
ID10T error
idempotent
IDP
If you want X, you know where to find it.
ifdef out
IIRC
ill-behaved
IMHO
Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!
in the extreme
incantation
include
include war
indent style
Indent-o-Meter
index of X
infant mortality
infinite
infinite loop
Infinite-Monkey Theorem
infinity
inflate
Infocom
initgame
insanely great
installfest
INTERCAL
InterCaps
interesting
Internet
Internet Death Penalty
Internet Exploder
Internet Exploiter
interrupt
interrupts locked out
intertwingled
intro
IRC
iron
Iron Age
iron box
ironmonger
ISO standard cup of tea
ISP
Itanic
ITS
IWBNI
IYFEG
J
J. Random
J. Random Hacker
jack in
jaggies
Java
JCL
JEDR
Jeff K.
jello
Jeopardy-style quoting
jibble
jiffy
job security
jock
joe code
joe-job
juggling eggs
juice
jump off into never-never land
jupiter
K
K
K&R
k-
kahuna
kamikaze packet
kangaroo code
ken
kernel-of-the-week club
kgbvax
KIBO
kiboze
kibozo
kick
kill file
killer app
killer micro
killer poke
kilo-
kilogoogle
KIPS
KISS Principle
kit
KLB
klone
kludge
kluge
kluge around
kluge up
Knights of the Lambda Calculus
knobs
knurd
Knuth
koan
kook
Kool-Aid
kremvax
kyrka
L
lag
lamer
LAN party
language lawyer
languages of choice
LART
larval stage
lase
laser chicken
leaf site
leak
leaky heap
leapfrog attack
leech
leech mode
legal
legalese
lenna
LER
LERP
let the smoke out
letterbomb
lexer
life
Life is hard
light pipe
lightweight
like kicking dead whales down the beach
like nailing jelly to a tree
line 666
line eater, the
line noise
linearithmic
link farm
link rot
link-dead
lint
Lintel
Linus
Linux
lion food
Lions Book
LISP
list-bomb
lithium lick
little-endian
live
live data
Live Free Or Die!
livelock
liveware
lobotomy
locals, the
locked and loaded
locked up
logic bomb
logical
loop through
loose bytes
lord high fixer
lose
lose lose
loser
losing
loss
lossage
lossy
lost in the noise
lost in the underflow
lots of MIPS but no I/O
low-bandwidth
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology
Lumber Cartel
lunatic fringe
lurker
luser
M
M
M$
macdink
machoflops
Macintoy
Macintrash
macro
macro-
macrology
maggotbox
magic
magic cookie
magic number
magic smoke
mail storm
mailbomb
mailing list
main loop
mainframe
mainsleaze
malware
man page
management
mandelbug
manged
mangle
mangled name
mangler
manularity
marching ants
marbles
marginal
marginally
marketroid
Mars
martian
massage
math-out
Matrix
mav
maximum Maytag mode
McQuary limit
meatspace
meatware
meeces
meg
mega-
megapenny
MEGO
meltdown, network
meme
meme plague
memetics
memory farts
memory leak
memory smash
menuitis
mess-dos
meta
meta bit
metasyntactic variable
MFTL
mickey
mickey mouse program
micro-
MicroDroid
microfortnight
microLenat
microReid
microserf
Microsloth Windows
Microsoft
micros~1
middle-endian
middle-out implementation
milliLampson
minor detail
MIPS
misbug
misfeature
missile address
MiSTing
miswart
MMF
mobo
moby
mockingbird
mod
mode
mode bit
modulo
mojibake
molly-guard
Mongolian Hordes technique
monkey up
monkey, scratch
monstrosity
monty
Moof
Moore's Law
moria
MOTAS
MOTOS
MOTSS
mouse ahead
mouse belt
mouse droppings
mouse elbow
mouse pusher
mouso
MS-DOS
mu
MUD
muddie
mudhead
muggle
Multics
multitask
mumblage
mumble
munch
munching
munching squares
munchkin
mundane
mung
munge
Murphy's Law
music
mutter
N
N
nadger
nagware
nailed to the wall
nailing jelly
naive
naive user
NAK
NANA
nano
nano-
nanoacre
nanobot
nanocomputer
nanofortnight
nanotechnology
narg
nasal demons
nastygram
Nathan Hale
nature
neat hack
neats vs. scruffies
neep-neep
neophilia
nerd
nerd knob
net.-
net.god
net.personality
net.police
netburp
netdead
nethack
netiquette
netlag
netnews
Netscrape
netsplit
netter
network address
network meltdown
New Jersey
New Testament
newbie
newgroup wars
newline
NeWS
newsfroup
newsgroup
nick
nickle
night mode
Nightmare File System
NIL
Ninety-Ninety Rule
nipple mouse
NMI
no-op
noddy
non-optimal solution
nonlinear
nontrivial
not entirely unlike X
not ready for prime time
notwork
NP-
NSA line eater
NSP
nude
nugry
nuke
number-crunching
numbers
NUXI problem
nybble
nyetwork
O
Ob-
Obfuscated C Contest
obi-wan error
Objectionable-C
obscure
octal forty
off the trolley
off-by-one error
offline
ogg
-oid
old fart
Old Testament
on the gripping hand
one-banana problem
one-line fix
one-liner wars
ooblick
OP
op
open
open source
open switch
operating system
operator headspace
optical diff
optical grep
optimism
Oracle, the
Orange Book
oriental food
orphan
orphaned i-node
orthogonal
OS
OS/2
OSS
OT
OTOH
out-of-band
overclock
overflow bit
overrun
overrun screw
owned
P
P.O.D.
packet over air
padded cell
page in
page out
pain in the net
paper-net
param
PARC
parent message
parity errors
Parkinson's Law of Data
parm
parse
Pascal
PascalCasing
pastie
patch
patch pumpkin
patch space
path
pathological
payware
PBD
PD
PDP-10
PDP-11
PDP-20
PEBKAC
peek
pencil and paper
Pentagram Pro
Pentium
peon
percent-S
perf
perfect programmer syndrome
Perl
person of no account
pessimal
pessimizing compiler
peta-
pffft
PFY
phage
phase
phase of the moon
phase-wrapping
PHB
phreaker
phreaking
pico-
pig-tail
pilot error
ping
Ping O' Death
ping storm
pink contract
pink wire
pipe
pistol
pixel sort
pizza box
plaid screen
plain-ASCII
Plan 9
plan file
platinum-iridium
playpen
playte
plokta
plonk
plug-and-pray
plugh
plumbing
PM
point release
point-and-drool interface
pointy hat
pointy-haired
poke
poll
polygon pusher
POM
ponytail
pop
poser
post
postcardware
Postel's Prescription
posting
postmaster
PostScript
pound on
power cycle
power hit
pr0n
precedence lossage
pred
prepend
prestidigitization
pretty pictures
prettyprint
pretzel key
priesthood
prime time
printing discussion
priority interrupt
profile
progasm
proggy
proglet
program
Programmer's Cheer
programming
programming fluid
propeller head
propeller key
proprietary
protocol
provocative maintenance
prowler
pseudo
pseudoprime
pseudosuit
psychedelicware
psyton
pubic directory
puff
pumpkin holder
pumpking
punched card
punt
Purple Book
purple wire
push
Python
Q
quad
quadruple bucky
quantifiers
quantum bogodynamics
quarter
ques
quick-and-dirty
quine
Quirk objection
quote chapter and verse
quotient
quux
qux
QWERTY
R
rabbit job
rain dance
rainbow series
random
Random Number God
random numbers
randomness
rape
rare mode
raster blaster
raster burn
rasterbation
rat belt
rat dance
rathole
ratio site
rave
rave on!
ravs
raw mode
RBL
rc file
RE
read-only user
README file
real
real estate
real hack
real operating system
Real Programmer
Real Soon Now
real time
real user
Real World
reality check
reality-distortion field
reaper
recompile the world
rectangle slinger
recursion
recursive acronym
red wire
regexp
register dancing
rehi
reincarnation, cycle of
reinvent the wheel
relay rape
religion of CHI
religious issues
replicator
reply
restriction
retcon
RETI
retrocomputing
return from the dead
RFC
RFE
Right Thing
rip
ripoff
RL
roach
robocanceller
robot
robust
rococo
rogue
room-temperature IQ
root
root mode
rootkit
rot13
rotary debugger
RSN
RTBM
RTFAQ
RTFB
RTFM
RTFS
RTI
RTM
RTS
rubber-hose cryptanalysis
rude
runes
runic
rusty iron
rusty wire
S
S/N ratio
sacred
saga
sagan
SAIL
salescritter
salt
salt mines
salt substrate
same-day service
samizdat
samurai
sandbender
sandbox
sanity check
Saturday-night special
say
scag
scanno
scary devil monastery
schroedinbug
science-fiction fandom
SCNR
scram switch
scratch
scratch monkey
scream and die
screaming tty
screen
screen name
screen scraping
screw
screwage
scribble
script kiddies
scrog
scrool
scrozzle
scruffies
SCSI
SCSI voodoo
search-and-destroy mode
second-system effect
secondary damage
security through obscurity
SED
See figure 1
segfault
seggie
segment
segmentation fault
segv
self-reference
selvage
semi
semi-automated
semi-infinite
senior bit
September that never ended
server
SEX
sex changer
shambolic link
shar file
sharchive
Share and enjoy!
shareware
sharing violation
shebang
shelfware
shell
shell out
shift left (or right) logical
shim
shitogram
shotgun debugging
shovelware
showstopper
shriek
Shub-Internet
SIG
sig block
sig quote
sig virus
sigmonster
signal-to-noise ratio
silicon
silly walk
silo
since time T equals minus infinity
sitename
skrog
skulker
slab
slack
slash
slashdot effect
sleep
slim
slop
slopsucker
Slowlaris
slurp
slurp the robot
smart
smart terminal
smash case
smash the stack
smiley
smoke
smoke and mirrors
smoke test
smoking clover
smoot
SMOP
smurf
SNAFU principle
snail
snail-mail
snap
snarf
snarf & barf
snarf down
snark
sneaker
sneakernet
sniff
snippage
SO
social engineering
social science number
sock puppet
sodium substrate
soft boot
softcopy
software bloat
software hoarding
software laser
software rot
softwarily
softy
some random X
sorcerer's apprentice mode
source
source of all good bits
space-cadet keyboard
spaceship operator
SPACEWAR
spaghetti code
spaghetti inheritance
spam
spam bait
spamblock
spamhaus
spamvertize
spangle
spawn
special-case
speed of light
speedometer
spell
spelling flame
spider
spider food
spiffy
spike
spin
Spinning Pizza of Death
spl
splash screen
splat
splat out
splork!
spod
spoiler
spoiler space
sponge
spoof
spool
spool file
sporgery
sport death
spungle
spyware
squirrelcide
stack
stack puke
stale pointer bug
Stanford Bunny
star out
state
stealth manager
steam-powered
steved
STFW
stir-fried random
stomp on
Stone Age
stone knives and bearskins
stoppage
store
STR
strided
stroke
strudel
stubroutine
studly
studlycaps
stunning
stupid-sort
Stupids
Sturgeon's Law
sucking mud
sufficiently small
suit
suitable win
suitably small
Sun
sun lounge
sun-stools
sunspots
super source quench
superloser
superprogrammer
superuser
support
surf
Suzie COBOL
swab
swap
swap space
swapped in
swapped out
Swiss-Army chainsaw
swizzle
sync
syntactic salt
syntactic sugar
sys-frog
sysadmin
sysape
sysop
system
system mangler
systems jock
T
T
tail recursion
talk mode
talker system
TAN
tanked
TANSTAAFL
tape monkey
tar and feather
tarball
tardegy
taste
tayste
TCB
TCP/IP
TECO
tee
teergrube
teledildonics
ten-finger interface
tense
tentacle
tenured graduate student
tera-
teraflop club
terminak
terminal brain death
terminal illness
terminal junkie
test
TeX
text
thanks in advance
That's not a bug, that's a feature!
the literature
the network
the X that can be Y is not the true X
theology
theory
thinko
This can't happen
This time, for sure!
thrash
thread
three-finger salute
throwaway account
thud
thumb
thundering herd problem
thunk
tick
tick-list features
tickle a bug
tiger team
time bomb
time sink
time T
times-or-divided-by
timesharing
TINC
Tinkerbell program
TINLC
tip of the ice-cube
tired iron
tits on a keyboard
TLA
TMRC
TMRCie
TMTOWTDI
to a first approximation
to a zeroth approximation
toad
toast
toaster
toeprint
TOFU
toggle
tool
toolchain
toolsmith
toor
top-post
topic drift
topic group
TOPS-10
TOPS-20
TOS
tourist
tourist information
touristic
toy
toy language
toy problem
toy program
trampoline
trap
trap door
trash
trawl
tree-killer
treeware
trit
trivial
troff
troglodyte
troglodyte mode
Trojan horse
troll
Troll-O-Meter
tron
troughie
true-hacker
tty
tube
tube time
tumbler
tunafish
tune
turbo nerd
Turing tar-pit
turist
Tux
tweak
TWENEX
twiddle
twilight zone
twink
twirling baton
two pi
two-to-the-N
tyop
U
u-
UBD
UBE
ubergeek
UCE
UDP
UN*X
undefined external reference
under the hood
undocumented feature
uninteresting
Unix
Unix brain damage
Unix conspiracy
Unix weenie
unixism
unswizzle
unwind the stack
unwind-protect
up
upload
upstream
upthread
uptime
urchin
URL
Usenet
Usenet Death Penalty
user
user-friendly
user-obsequious
userland
Utah teapot, the
UTSL
UUOC
V
V7
vadding
vanilla
vanity domain
vannevar
vaporware
var
vaston
VAX
VAXen
vaxocentrism
vdiff
veeblefester
velveeta
Venus flytrap
verbage
verbiage
Version 7
vgrep
vi
video toaster
videotex
virgin
virtual
virtual beer
virtual Friday
virtual reality
virtual shredder
virus
visionary
Visual Fred
VMS
voice
voice-net
voodoo programming
VR
Vulcan nerve pinch
vulture capitalist
W
w00t
wabbit
WAITS
waldo
walk
walk off the end of
walking drives
wall
wall follower
wall time
wall wart
wallhack
wango
wank
wannabee
war dialer
war-driving
war-chalking
-ware
warez
warez d00dz
warez kiddies
warlording
warm boot
wart
washing machine
washing software
water MIPS
wave a dead chicken
weasel
web pointer
web ring
web toaster
webify
webmaster
wedged
wedgie
wedgitude
weeble
weeds
weenie
Weenix
well-behaved
well-connected
wetware
whack
whack-a-mole
whacker
whales
What's a spline?
wheel
wheel bit
wheel of reincarnation
wheel wars
white hat
whitelist
whizzy
Whorfian mind-lock
wibble
WIBNI
widget
wiggles
wild side
WIMP environment
win
win big
win win
Winchester
windoid
window shopping
Windowsitis
Windoze
winged comments
winkey
winnage
winner
winnitude
Wintel
Wintendo
wired
wirehead
wirewater
wish list
within delta of
within epsilon of
wizard
Wizard Book
wizard hat
wizard mode
wizardly
wok-on-the-wall
womb box
WOMBAT
womble
wonky
workaround
working as designed
worm
wormhole
wound around the axle
wrap around
write-only code
write-only language
write-only memory
Wrong Thing
wugga wugga
wumpus
WYSIAYG
WYSIWYG
X
X
XEROX PARC
XOFF
XON
xor
xref
XXX
xyzzy
Y
YA-
YABA
YAFIYGI
yak shaving
YAUN
yellow card
yellow wire
Yet Another
YHBT
YKYBHTLW
YMMV
You are not expected to understand this
You know you've been hacking too long when
Your mileage may vary
Yow!
yoyo mode
Yu-Shiang Whole Fish
Z
zap
zapped
Zawinski's Law
zbeba
zen
zero
zero-content
Zero-One-Infinity Rule
zeroth
zigamorph
zip
zipperhead
zombie
zorch
Zork
zorkmid
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0
(TM)
/dev/null
/me
0
1TBS
2
404
404 compliant
@-party
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/dev/null
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/dev/null: /dev?nuhl/, n.
[from the Unix null device, used as a data sink] A notional 'black hole' in any information space being discussed, used, or referred to. A controversial posting, for example, might end "Kudos to rasputin@kremlin.org, flames to /dev/null". See
bit bucket.
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/me
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/me: //
[IRC; common] Under most IRC, /me is the "pose" command; if you are logged on as Foonly and type "/me laughs", others watching the channel will see "* Joe Foonly laughs". This usage has been carried over to mail and news, where the reader is expected to perform the same expansion in his or her head.
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0
Numeric zero, as opposed to the letter 'O' (the 15th letter of the English alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike, and various kluges invented to make them visually distinct have compounded the confusion. If your zero is center-dotted and letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero looks more like an American football stood on end (or the reverse), you're probably looking at a modern character display (though the dotted zero seems to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 controllers). If your zero is slashed but letter-O is not, you're probably looking at an old-style ASCII graphic set descended from the default typewheel on the venerable ASR-33 Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom ؠis a letter, curse this arrangement). (Interestingly, the slashed zero long predates computers; Florian Cajori's monumental A History of Mathematical Notations notes that it was used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) If letter-O has a slash across it and the zero does not, your display is tuned for a very old convention used at IBM and a few other early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse this arrangement even more, because it means two of their letters collide). Some Burroughs/Unisys equipment displays a zero with a reversed slash. Old CDC computers rendered letter O as an unbroken oval and 0 as an oval broken at upper right and lower left. And yet another convention common on early line printers left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O (this was endorsed by a draft ANSI standard for how to draw ASCII characters, but the final standard changed the distinguisher to a tick-mark in the upper-left corner). Are we sufficiently confused yet?
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