The Hackers Dictionary | Page 4

conscious of some important shared experiences, shared roots, and shared
values. It has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams.

Because hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves partly
by rejection of `normal' values and working habits, it has unusually rich and conscious
traditions for an intentional culture less than 35 years old.
As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold their culture together ---
it helps hackers recognize each other's places in the community and expresses shared
values and experiences. Also as usual, *not* knowing the slang (or using it
inappropriately) defines one as an outsider, a mundane, or (worst of all in hackish
vocabulary) possibly even a {suit}. All human cultures use slang in this threefold way ---
as a tool of communication, and of inclusion, and of exclusion.
Among hackers, though, slang has a subtler aspect, paralleled perhaps in the slang of jazz
musicians and some kinds of fine artists but hard to detect in most technical or scientific
cultures; parts of it are code for shared states of *consciousness*. There is a whole range
of altered states and problem-solving mental stances basic to high-level hacking which
don't fit into conventional linguistic reality any better than a Coltrane solo or one of
Maurits Escher's `trompe l'oeil' compositions (Escher is a favorite of hackers), and hacker
slang encodes these subtleties in many unobvious ways. As a simple example, take the
distinction between a {kluge} and an {elegant} solution, and the differing connotations
attached to each. The distinction is not only of engineering significance; it reaches right
back into the nature of the generative processes in program design and asserts something
important about two different kinds of relationship between the hacker and the hack.
Hacker slang is unusually rich in implications of this kind, of overtones and undertones
that illuminate the hackish psyche.
But there is more. Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive
in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the
conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons
them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures
of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast,
regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their
inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of
language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence. Further, the
electronic media which knit them together are fluid, `hot' connections, well adapted to
both the dissemination of new slang and the ruthless culling of weak and superannuated
specimens. The results of this process give us perhaps a uniquely intense and accelerated
view of linguistic evolution in action.
Hackish slang also challenges some common linguistic and anthropological assumptions.
For example, it has recently become fashionable to speak of `low-context' versus
`high-context' communication, and to classify cultures by the preferred context level of
their languages and art forms. It is usually claimed that low-context communication
(characterized by precision, clarity, and completeness of self-contained utterances) is
typical in cultures which value logic, objectivity, individualism, and competition; by
contrast, high-context communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal,
heavily coded) is associated with cultures which value subjectivity, consensus,
cooperation, and tradition. What then are we to make of hackerdom, which is themed

around extremely low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily
"low-context" values, but cultivates an almost absurdly high-context slang style?
The intensity and consciousness of hackish invention make a compilation of hacker slang
a particularly effective window into the surrounding culture --- and, in fact, this one is the
latest version of an evolving compilation called the `Jargon File', maintained by hackers
themselves for over 15 years. This one (like its ancestors) is primarily a lexicon, but also
includes `topic entries' which collect background or sidelight information on hacker
culture that would be awkward to try to subsume under individual entries.
Though the format is that of a reference volume, it is intended that the material be
enjoyable to browse. Even a complete outsider should find at least a chuckle on nearly
every page, and much that is amusingly thought-provoking. But it is also true that hackers
use humorous wordplay to make strong, sometimes combative statements about what
they feel. Some of these entries reflect the views of opposing sides in disputes that have
been genuinely passionate; this is deliberate. We have not tried to moderate or pretty up
these disputes; rather we have attempted to ensure that *everyone's* sacred cows get
gored, impartially. Compromise is not particularly a hackish virtue, but the honest
presentation of divergent viewpoints is.
The reader with minimal computer background who finds some references
incomprehensibly technical can safely ignore