The New Hackers Dictionary | Page 7

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 Wall Street Journal => Wall Street Urinal
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 Microsoft => Microsloth Internet
Explorer => Internet Exploiter
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.
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Node:The -P convention, Next:[91]Overgeneralization,
Previous:[92]Soundalike Slang, Up:[93]Jargon Construction

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 [94]T and [95]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 [96]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]
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Node:Overgeneralization, Next:[97]Spoken Inarticulations,
Previous:[98]The -P convention, Up:[99]Jargon Construction
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 [100]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
Another class of common construction uses the suffix `-itude' to
abstract a quality from just about any adjective or noun. This usage
arises especially in cases where mainstream English would perform the
same abstraction through `-iness' or `-ingness'. Thus:
win => winnitude (a common exclamation) loss => lossitude cruft =>
cruftitude lame => lameitude
Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation; they argue, for
example, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be called
`lats' -- after all, they're measuring latitude!
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.
The suffix "-full" can also be applied in generalized and fanciful ways,
as in "As soon as you have more than one cachefull of data, the system

starts thrashing," or "As soon as I have more than one headfull of ideas,
I start writing it all down." A common use is "screenfull", meaning the
amount of text that will fit on one screen, usually in text mode where
you have no choice as to character size. Another common form is
"bufferfull".
However, 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 => disgustitude hack =>
hackification
Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural
forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary
includes an entry which implies that the plural of `mouse' is
[101]meeces, and notes that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese'.
This latter has apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke)
among railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years.
On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x' may
form plurals in `-xen' (see [102]VAXen and [103]boxen in the main