The Hackers Dictionary | Page 8

became established quite early
(i.e., before 1970), spreading from such sources as the Tech Model Railroad Club, the
PDP-1 SPACEWAR hackers, and John McCarthy's original crew of LISPers. These
include the following:
:Verb Doubling: --------------- A standard construction in English is to double a verb and
use it as an exclamation, such as "Bang, bang!" or "Quack, quack!". Most of these are
names for noises. Hackers also double verbs as a concise, sometimes sarcastic comment
on what the implied subject does. Also, a doubled verb is often used to terminate a
conversation, in the process remarking on the current state of affairs or what the speaker
intends to do next. Typical examples involve {win}, {lose}, {hack}, {flame}, {barf},
{chomp}:
"The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose." "Mostly he talked about his latest crock.
Flame, flame." "Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!"
Some verb-doubled constructions have special meanings not immediately obvious from
the verb. These have their own listings in the lexicon.

The USENET culture has one *tripling* convention unrelated to this; the names of `joke'
topic groups often have a tripled last element. The first and paradigmatic example was
alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork (a "Muppet Show" reference); other classics include
alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg, alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die,
comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk, sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom,
and alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill.
:Soundalike slang: ------------------ Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to
convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered
particularly {flavorful} if the phrase is bent so as to include some other jargon word; thus
the computer hobbyist magazine `Dr. Dobb's Journal' is almost always referred to among
hackers as `Dr. Frob's Journal' or simply `Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in
fairly wide use include names for newspapers:
Boston Herald => Horrid (or Harried) Boston Globe => Boston Glob Houston (or San
Francisco) Chronicle => the Crocknicle (or the Comical) New York Times => New York
Slime
However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard
examples include:
Data General => Dirty Genitals IBM 360 => IBM Three-Sickly Government Property ---
Do Not Duplicate (on keys) => Government Duplicity --- Do Not Propagate for historical
reasons => for hysterical raisins Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford) =>
Marginal Hacks Hall
This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the
past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker punning jargon is
intentionally transparent.
:The `-P' convention: --------------------- Turning a word into a question by appending the
syllable `P'; from the LISP convention of appending the letter `P' to denote a predicate (a
boolean-valued function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't.
(See {T} and {NIL}.)
At dinnertime: Q: "Foodp?" A: "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!"
At any time: Q: "State-of-the-world-P?" A: (Straight) "I'm about to go home." A:
(Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state."
On the phone to Florida: Q: "State-p Florida?" A: "Been reading JARGON.TXT again,
eh?"
[One of the best of these is a {Gosperism}. Once, when we were at a Chinese restaurant,
Bill Gosper wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a
two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" --- GLS]
:Overgeneralization: -------------------- A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the

frequency with which techspeak items such as names of program tools, command
language primitives, and even assembler opcodes are applied to contexts outside of
computing wherever hackers find amusing analogies to them. Thus (to cite one of the
best-known examples) UNIX hackers often {grep} for things rather than searching for
them. Many of the lexicon entries are generalizations of exactly this kind.
Hackers enjoy overgeneralization on the grammatical level as well. Many hackers love to
take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by
extending a standard rule to nonuniform cases (or vice versa). For example, because
porous => porosity generous => generosity
hackers happily generalize:
mysterious => mysteriosity ferrous => ferrosity obvious => obviosity dubious =>
dubiosity
Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: "All nouns can be verbed", "I'll mouse it
up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over", "I'm grepping the files". English as a whole is
already heading in this direction (towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese); hackers
are simply a bit ahead of the curve.
However, note that hackers avoid the unimaginative verb-making techniques
characteristic of marketroids, bean-counters, and the Pentagon; a hacker would never, for
example, `productize', `prioritize', or `securitize' things. Hackers have a strong aversion to
bureaucratic bafflegab and regard those who use it with contempt.
Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight overgeneralization in modern
English; in hackish, however, it is good form to mark them in some standard nonstandard
way. Thus:
win => winnitude, winnage disgust