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