|
|
|
Commonwealth Hackish n.
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 pound currency symbol (of course).
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, bum, chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nybble, proglet, root, SEX, tweak, womble, and xyzzy.
|
|
|