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]
