Hacker jargon as spoken in English outside the U.S., esp. in the
British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more
likely to pronounce truncations like ‘char’ and
‘soc’, etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in
newsgroup names (especially two-component names)
tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib“l/ rather than /sohsh wib“l/).
Preferred metasyntactic variables include
blurgle, eek,
ook, frodo,
and bilbo; wibble,
wobble, and in emergencies wubble; flob,
banana, tom, dick, harry, wombat,
frog, fish,
womble and so on and on (see
foo, sense 4). Alternatives to verb doubling
include suffixes -o-rama, frenzy (as in feeding frenzy), and city (examples: “barf city!”
“hack-o-rama!” “core dump frenzy!”).
All the generic differences within the anglophone world inevitably
show themselves in the associated hackish dialects. The Greek letters beta
and zeta are usually pronounced /bee“t@/ and /zee“t@/; meta may also be
pronounced /mee“t@/.
Various punctuators (and even letters - Z is called ‘zed’, not
‘zee’) are named differently: most crucially, for hackish,
where Americans use ‘parens’, ‘brackets’ and
`braces' for (), [] and {}, Commonwealth English uses
‘brackets’, ‘square brackets’ and ‘curly
brackets’, though ‘parentheses’ may be used for the
first; the exclamation mark, ‘!’, is called pling rather than
bang and the pound sign, ‘#’, is called hash; furthermore, the
term ‘the pound sign’ is understood to mean the £ (of
course). Canadian hacker slang, as with mainstream language, mixes
American and British usages about evenly.
See also attoparsec,
calculator, chemist,
console jockey, fish,
go-faster stripes, grunge,
hakspek, heavy metal,
leaky heap, lord high fixer,
loose bytes, muddie,
nadger, noddy,
psychedelicware,
raster blaster, RTBM,
seggie, spod,
sun lounge, terminal junkie,
tick-list features, weeble,
weasel, YABA, and notes or
definitions under Bad Thing,
barf, bogus,
chase pointers, cosmic rays,
crippleware, crunch,
dodgy, gonk,
hamster, hardwarily,
mess-dos, nybble,
proglet, root,
SEX, tweak,
womble, and xyzzy.
