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 variable}s 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 £ (of course). Canadian
hacker slang, as with mainstream language, mixes American and British
usages about evenly.
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}, {chase pointers}, {cosmic rays},
{crippleware}, {crunch}, {dodgy}, {gonk}, {hamster}, {hardwarily},
{mess-dos}, {nybble}, {proglet}, {root}, {SEX}, {tweak}, {womble},
and {xyzzy}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {ASCII}{metasyntactic variable}{WOMBAT}]