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 metasyntacticvariables 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, consolejockey, 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)