Commonwealth Hackish


: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 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 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


Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =

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