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]



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Common Object Model
Common Object Request Broker Architecture
Common Objects
Common Program Interface
Common User Access
barf
barney
boink
bum
Commonwealth Hackish
Communicating Functional Processes
Communicating Sequential Processes
Communications Decency Act
Communications of the ACM
communications port