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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.
* [71]Verb Doubling: Doubling a verb may change its semantics
* [72]Soundalike Slang: Punning jargon
* [73]The -P convention: A LISPy way to form questions
* [74]Overgeneralization: Standard abuses of grammar
* [75]Spoken Inarticulations: Sighing and <*sigh*>ing
* [76]Anthropomorphization: Homunculi, daemons, and confused
programs
* [77]Comparatives: Standard comparatives for design quality
_________________________________________________________________
Node:Verb Doubling, Next:[78]Soundalike Slang, Up:[79]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 [80]win, [81]lose, [82]hack,
[83]flame, [84]barf, [85]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 [86]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
_________________________________________________________________
Node:Soundalike Slang, Next:[87]The -P convention, Previous:[88]Verb
Doubling, Up:[89]Jargon Construction
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 [90]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
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.
_________________________________________________________________
Node:The -P convention, Next:[91]Overgeneralization,
Previous:[92]Soundalike Slang, Up:[93]Jargon Construction
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 [94]T and [95]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 [96]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]
_________________________________________________________________
Node:Overgeneralization, Next:[97]Spoken Inarticulations,
Previous:[98]The -P convention, Up:[99]Jargon Construction
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 [100]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
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
[101]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 [102]VAXen and [103]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 [104]frobnitz) and
`Unices' and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see
[105]Unix, [106]TWENEX in main text). But note that `Twenexen' was
never used, and `Unixen' was not 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. 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.
_________________________________________________________________
Node:Spoken Inarticulations, Next:[107]Anthropomorphization,
Previous:[108]Overgeneralization, Up:[109]Jargon Construction
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!"
_________________________________________________________________
Node:Anthropomorphization, Next:[110]Comparatives,
Previous:[111]Spoken Inarticulations, Up:[112]Jargon Construction
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". 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 seemds to ascribe conciousness 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 a that a human machine can have intentions, it
is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to
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
truth but of utility. Hackers typically view simple programs from the
design stance, but more complex ones are modelled using the
intentional stance.
_________________________________________________________________
Node:Comparatives, Previous:[113]Anthropomorphization, Up:[114]Jargon
Construction
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.) and may change places with `flaky' for some
speakers.
Coinages for describing [115]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.
_________________________________________________________________
Node:Hacker Writing Style, Next:[116]Email Quotes,
Previous:[117]Jargon Construction, Up:[118]Top
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 [119]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 Latin languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan)
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 [120]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 [121]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 [122]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
, , ,
, , , . This use of angle brackets to mark
their contents originally derives from conventions used in [123]BNF,
but since about 1993 it has been reinforced by the HTML markup used on
the World Wide Web.
Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term stands
for some [124]random member of a larger class (this is straight from
[125]BNF). Examples like the following are common:
So this walks into a bar one day...
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).
This convention 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 tale on new life on IRCs and other
line-based chat systems.
I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.
Send it to Erik for the File.
Oops...s/Erik/Eric/.
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