The Jargon File, Version 2.9.10, 01 Jul 1992 - Various

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final manuscript; he read and reread many drafts, checked facts, caught typos, submitted an amazing number of thoughtful comments, and did yeoman service in catching typos and minor usage bobbles. Mr. Brader's rare combination of enthusiasm, persistence, wide-ranging technical knowledge, and precisionism in matters of language made his help invaluable, and the sustained volume and quality of his input over many months only allowed him to escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of margins.

      Finally, George V. Reilly <[email protected]> helped with TeX arcana and painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions; Steve Summit <[email protected]> contributed a number of excellent new entries and many small improvements to 2.9.10; and Eric Tiedemann <[email protected]> contributed sage advice throughout on rhetoric, amphigory, and philosophunculism.

       Table of Contents

      :Jargon Construction: =====================

      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 the following:

      :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 classics include 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, and alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill.

      :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

      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

      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.

      :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?"

      [One of the best of these is a {Gosperism}. 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]

      :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 generous => generosity

      hackers happily generalize:

      mysterious => mysteriosity ferrous => ferrosity obvious => obviosity dubious => dubiosity

      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.

      However, note that 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 noted that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese', and includes an entry which implies that the plural of `mouse' is {meeces}. 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 `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 `Unixen' and `Twenexen' are never used; it has been suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural. Finally, it has been suggested to general approval that the plural of `mongoose' ought to be `polygoose'.

      The

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