OS/2 Shareware BBS: 14 Text/14-Text.zip/JARGON.ZIP/INT299.INF

OS/2 Help File | 1992-04-29 | 71KB | 1,345 lines

ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 1. Read Me ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Notes on the OS/2 .INF Rendering of the Jargon File
Neal Bridges, April 1992

Personal Notes

I created this .INF rendering of the Jargon File in April, 1992 as part of an
effort to familiarize myself with GNU AWK and the OS/2 IPF compiler.

Please send any comments, etc. to:

    Neal Bridges
    [e-mail]
    [phone]

Standard Disclaimer

I disclaim all responsibility for damages caused by the use of these files or
the information contained therein.

About This Package

The source document for these .INF files was the ASCII version of the Jargon
File version 2.9.9, massaged via GNU OS/2 AWK version 2.11, and compiled to
four interdependent .INF files with the OS/2 Information Presentation Facility
Compiler (IPFC) version 2.0.  It has been tested under OS/2 version 2.0 GA, and
OS/2 1.3, and should work (according to IBM's docs) under any version of OS/2
supporting the VIEW utility.

This package is hereby released into the public domain.  Kindly don't sell it,
and be sure not to pay for it.

This is the complete list of the files you should have:

        README          ; this text
        INT299.INF      ; the Jargon File introduction
        1VOL299.INF     ; Lexicon entries from A to M
        2VOL299.INF     ; Lexicon entries from N to [^A-Za-z]
        APP299.INF      ; the Jargon File appendices

Caution:  Feel free distribute these files, but please distribute them
          together. They are interdependent, and any missing files will result
          in various hypertext links not functioning.

 (If you're wondering why there isn't just one big .INF file, it's because IPFC
 2.0 has certain limitations, one of which is the inability to deal with input
 files having more than 16,000 unique words.  To accomodate it, I had to break
 the file into four parts.)

 All of these files should be put in one directory (e.g. C:\OS2\BOOK (the
 default .INF directory) or C:\JARGON (or another name of your own choosing)).
 The Jargon File will (just) fit on a 1.2M or 1.44M floppy disk.  Hard drive
 installation is recommended for speed, but the giantish size of these .INF
 files may well dictate floppy storage.

 Hard Drives Only:  If (and only if) you have chosen hard drive installation,
                    the directory containing the .INF files should then be
                    added to the SET BOOK= line  in your CONFIG.SYS, for
                    example:

                                                SET BOOK=C:\OS2\BOOK;C:\JARGON

 The system will need to be shut down and restarted for this change to take effect.

  Viewing the Jargon File

 1)  To view the Jargon File, set an OS/2 environment variable (in the
 CONFIG.SYS or elsewhere), like this:

   Hard Drive Installation:

  SET JARGON=INT299.INF+1VOL299.INF+2VOL299.INF+APP299.INF

   Floppy Drive Installation:

  SET JARGON=A:\INT299.INF+A:\1VOL299.INF+A:\2VOL299.INF+A:\APP299.INF

 (note that the .INF extensions are required).  Then (from an OS/2 Command
 Prompt) use the command:

          VIEW JARGON

 to view the complete document.

 2)  Alternatively, from an OS/2 Command Prompt, type:

          VIEW INT299+1VOL299+2VOL299+APP299

 Of the two methods, 1) is (IMHO) by far the most convenient.

 Note:  If you view only one of these sections (for example, 1VOL299.INF),
        double-clicking on a hypertext link to an entry not contained in that
        section will result in an "IPF: Link not found" popup message.  This is
        because all four .INF sections of the File have hypertext links into
        the other three.  For all the hypertext links to work, the entire book
        must be viewed as per 1) or 2) above.

  Finding An Jargon File Entry

 There are two ways to find a Jargon File entry.

  Slow

 Let's suppose you want to view the entry for "GNU".  You would open the Jargon
 File, expand the branch "A-M", then expand the sub-branch "G to Gweep", and
 then double-click on "GNU".

  Fast

 Assuming you have installed the Jargon File according to method 1) above,
 simply type (from an OS/2 Command Prompt):

          VIEW JARGON GNU

 Happy Jargon File browsing!


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 2. About Version 2.9.9 ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

#========= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.9, 01 APR 1992 =========#

This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang
illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

This document (the Jargon File) is in the public domain, to be freely used,
shared, and modified.  There are (by intention) no legal restraints on what you
can do with it, but there are traditions about its proper use to which many
hackers are quite strongly attached. Please extend the courtesy of proper
citation when you quote the File, ideally with a version number, as it will
change and grow over time. (Examples of appropropriate citation form: "Jargon
File 2.9.9" or "The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 2.9.9, 01 APR 1992".)

The Jargon File is a common heritage of the hacker culture. Over the years a
number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to maintaining the
File and been recognized by the net at large as editors of it.  Editorial
responsibilities include: to collate contributions and suggestions from others;
to seek out corroborating information; to cross-reference related entries; to
keep the file in a consistent format; and to announce and distribute updated
versions periodically.  Current volunteer editors include:

    Eric Raymond   [e-mail]      (215)-296-5718

Although there is no requirement that you do so, it is considered good form to
check with an editor before quoting the File in a published work or commercial
product.  We may have additional information that would be helpful to you and
can assist you in framing your quote to reflect not only the letter of the File
but its spirit as well.

All contributions and suggestions about this file sent to a volunteer editor
are gratefully received and will be regarded, unless otherwise labelled, as
freely given donations for possible use as part of this public-domain file.

From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished, edited, and
formatted for commercial publication with the cooperation of the volunteer
editors and the hacker community at large.  If you wish to have a bound paper
copy of this file, you may find it convenient to purchase one of these.  They
often contain additional material not found in on-line versions.  The two
'authorized' editions so far are described in the Revision History section;
there may be more in the future.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3. Introduction ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

                                  Introduction


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.1. About This File ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

This document is a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures of
computer hackers.  Though some technical material is included for background
and flavor, it is not a technical dictionary; what we describe here is the
language hackers use among themselves for fun, social communication, and
technical debate.

The 'hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of subcultures
that is nevertheless 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.

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 them.  We have not felt it either
necessary or desirable to eliminate all such; they, too, contribute flavor ,
and one of this document's major intended audiences --- fledgling hackers
already partway inside the culture --- will benefit from them.

A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor is included in
appendix A.  The 'outside' reader's attention is particularly directed to
appendix B, "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker".  Appendix C is a bibliography of
non-technical works which have either influenced or described the hacker
culture.

Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one each individual must choose by
action to join), one should not be surprised that the line between description
and influence can become more than a little blurred. Earlier versions of the
Jargon File have played a central role in spreading hacker language and the
culture that goes with it to successively larger populations, and we hope and
expect that this one will do likewise.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Linguists usually refer to informal language as 'slang' and reserve the term
'jargon' for the technical vocabularies of various occupations. However, the
ancestor of this collection was called the 'Jargon File', and hackish slang is
traditionally 'the jargon'.  When talking about the jargon there is therefore
no convenient way to distinguish what a linguist would call hackers' jargon ---
the formal vocabulary they learn from textbooks, technical papers, and manuals.

To make a confused situation worse, the line between hackish slang and the
vocabulary of technical programming and computer science is fuzzy, and shifts
over time.  Further, this vocabulary is shared with a wider technical culture
of programmers, many of whom are not hackers and do not speak or recognize
hackish slang.

Accordingly, this lexicon will try to be as precise as the facts of usage
permit about the distinctions among three categories:

 *  'slang': informal language from mainstream English or non-technical
   subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc).

 *  'jargon': without qualifier, denotes informal 'slangy' language
   peculiar to hackers --- the subject of this lexicon.

 *  'techspeak': the formal technical vocabulary of programming,
   computer science, electronics, and other fields connected to
   hacking.

This terminology will be consistently used throughout the remainder of this
lexicon.

The jargon/techspeak distinction is the delicate one.  A lot of techspeak
originated as jargon, and there is a steady continuing uptake of jargon into
techspeak.  On the other hand, a lot of jargon arises from overgeneralization
of techspeak terms (there is more about this in the "Jargon Construction"
section below).

In general, we have considered techspeak any term that communicates primarily
by a denotation well established in textbooks, technical dictionaries, or
standards documents.

A few obviously techspeak terms (names of operating systems, languages, or
documents) are listed when they are tied to hacker folklore that isn't covered
in formal sources, or sometimes to convey critical historical background
necessary to understand other entries to which they are cross-referenced.  Some
other techspeak senses of jargon words are listed in order to make the jargon
senses clear; where the text does not specify that a straight technical sense
is under discussion, these are marked with '[techspeak]' as an etymology.  Some
entries have a primary sense marked this way, with subsequent jargon meanings
explained in terms of it.

We have also tried to indicate (where known) the apparent origins of terms.
The results are probably the least reliable information in the lexicon, for
several reasons.  For one thing, it is well known that many hackish usages have
been independently reinvented multiple times, even among the more obscure and
intricate neologisms .  It often seems that the generative processes underlying
hackish jargon formation have an internal logic so powerful as to create
substantial parallelism across separate cultures and even in different
languages!  For another, the networks tend to propagate innovations so quickly
that 'first use' is often impossible to pin down.  And, finally, compendia like
this one alter what they observe by implicitly stamping cultural approval on
terms and widening their use.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.3. Revision History ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon from technical
cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), and others of
the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman
(BBN), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute
(WPI).

The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as 'jargon-1' or 'the File') was begun
by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975.  From this time until the plug was
finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named
AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there.  Some terms in it date back considerably earlier (frob
and some senses of moby, for instance, go back to the Tech Model Railroad Club
at MIT and are believed to date at least back to the early 1960s).  The
revisions of jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered
'Version 1'.

In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL
computer, FTPed a copy of the File to MIT.  He noticed that it was hardly
restricted to 'AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL
JARGON.

The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the '>' means numbered with a version
number) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele
Jr.  Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of correcting the
term 'jargon' to 'slang' until the compendium had already become widely known
as the Jargon File.

Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don
Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in
duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations).

The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman was
prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages.

In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File
published in Russell Brand's 'CoEvolution Quarterly' (pages 26-35) with
illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly
cartoons).  This appears to have been the File's first paper publication.

A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was
edited by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as 'The Hacker's Dictionary'
(Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8).  The other jargon-1 editors
(Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as
did Richard M. Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow.  This book (now out of print) is
hereafter referred to as 'Steele-1983' and those six as the Steele-1983
coauthors.

Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped
growing and changing.  Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file
temporarily to facilitate the production of Steele-1983, but external
conditions caused the 'temporary' freeze to become permanent.

The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the
resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and software
instead of homebrew whenever possible.  At MIT, most AI work had turned to
dedicated LISP Machines.  At the same time, the commercialization of AI
technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along
the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley.  The
startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a
TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved ITS.

The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL
computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until 1991.
Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen
TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the interesting software work was
being done on the emerging BSD UNIX standard.

In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the File were
dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at Digital
Equipment Corporation.  The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to
other things.  Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought
was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how wide its
influence was to be.

By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had grown up
around it never quite died out.  The book, and softcopies obtained off the
ARPANET, circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT and Stanford; the
content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hackish language and
humor.  Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a
tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related  materials such as the
AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a
hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights
of the Lab.  The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously
--- but the Jargon File, having passed from living document to icon, remained
essentially untouched for seven years.

This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of jargon-1 (a
few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after careful consultation
with the editors of Steele-1983).  It merges in about 80% of the Steele-1983
text, omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in
Steele-1983 that are now also obsolete.

This new version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim is to
cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all the technical computing
cultures wherein the true hacker-nature is manifested.  More than half of the
entries now derive from USENET and represent jargon now current in the C and
UNIX communities, but special efforts have been made to collect jargon from
other cultures including IBM PC programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and
even the IBM mainframe world.

Eric S. Raymond <[e-mail]> maintains the new File with assistance
from Guy L. Steele Jr. <[e-mail]>; these are the persons primarily
reflected in the File's editorial 'we', though we take pleasure in
acknowledging the special contribution of the other coauthors of Steele-1983.
Please email all additions, corrections, and correspondence relating to the
Jargon File to [e-mail] (UUCP-only sites without connections to an
autorouting smart site can use ...!uunet!snark!jargon).

(Warning: other email addresses appear in this file but are not guaranteed to
be correct later than the revision date on the first line. Don't email us if an
attempt to reach your idol bounces --- we have no magic way of checking
addresses or looking up people.)

The 2.9.6 version became the main text of 'The New Hacker's Dictionary', by
Eric Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6.  The maintainers are
committed to updating the on-line version of the Jargon File through  and
beyond paper publication, and will continue to make it available to archives
and public-access sites as a trust of the hacker community.

Here is a chronology of the high points in the recent on-line revisions:

Version 2.1.1, Jun 12 1990: the Jargon File comes alive again after a
seven-year hiatus.  Reorganization and massive additions were by Eric S.
Raymond, approved by Guy Steele.  Many items of UNIX, C, USENET, and
microcomputer-based jargon were added at that time (as well as The Untimely
Demise of Mabel The Monkey).

Version 2.9.6, Aug 16 1991: corresponds to reproduction copy for book. This
version had 18952 lines, 148629 words, 975551 characters, and 1702 entries.

Version 2.9.8, Jan 01 1992: first public release since the book, including over
fifty new entries and numerous corrections/additions to old ones.  Packaged
with version 1.1 of vh(1) hypertext reader.  This version had 19509 lines,
153108 words, 1006023 characters, and 1760 entries.

Version 2.9.9, Apr 01 1992: folded in XEROX PARC lexicon.  This version had
20298 lines, 159651 words, 1048909 characters, and 1821 entries.

Version numbering: Version numbers should be read as major.minor.revision.
Major version 1 is reserved for the 'old' (ITS) Jargon File, jargon-1.  Major
version 2 encompasses revisions by ESR (Eric S. Raymond) with assistance from
GLS (Guy L.  Steele, Jr.). Someday, the next maintainer will take over and
spawn 'version 3'. Usually later versions will either completely supersede or
incorporate earlier versions, so there is generally no point in keeping old
versions around.

Our thanks to the coauthors of Steele-1983 for oversight and assistance, and to
the hundreds of USENETters (too many to name here) who contributed entries and
encouragement.  More thanks go to several of the old-timers on the USENET group
alt.folklore.computers, who contributed much useful commentary and many
corrections and valuable historical perspective: Joseph M. Newcomer
<[e-mail]>, Bernie Cosell <[e-mail]>, Earl Boebert
<[e-mail]>, and Joe Morris <[e-mail]>.

We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished linguists. David
Stampe <[e-mail]> and Charles Hoequist <[e-mail]>
contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane <[e-mail]> helped us improve
the pronunciation guides.

A few bits of this text quote previous works.  We are indebted to Brian A.
LaMacchia <[e-mail]> for obtaining permission for us to use
material from the 'TMRC Dictionary'; also, Don Libes <[e-mail]>
contributed some appropriate material from his excellent book 'Life With UNIX'.
We thank Per Lindberg <[e-mail]>, author of the remarkable Swedish-language
'zine 'Hackerbladet', for bringing 'FOO!' comics to our attention and smuggling
one of the IBM hacker underground's own baby jargon files out to us.  Thanks
also to Maarten Litmaath for generously allowing the inclusion of the ASCII
pronunciation guide he formerly maintained.  And our gratitude to Marc Weiser
of XEROX PARC <[e-mail]> for securing us permission to quote
from PARC's own jargon lexicon and shipping us a copy.

It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the major contributions of Mark
Brader <[e-mail]> to the final manuscript; he read and reread many drafts,
checked facts, caught typos, submitted an amazing number of thoughtful
comments, and did yeoman service in catching typos and minor usage bobbles.
Mr. Brader's rare combination of enthusiasm, persistence, wide-ranging
technical knowledge, and precisionism in matters of language made his help
invaluable, and the sustained volume and quality of his input over many months
only allowed him to escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of margins.

Finally, George V.  Reilly <[e-mail]> helped with TeX arcana and
painstakingly proofread some late versions; and Eric Tiedemann
<[e-mail]> contributed sage advice on rhetoric, amphigory, and
philosophunculism.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4. How Jargon Works ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

                                How Jargon Works


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1. Jargon Construction ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

There are some standard methods of jargonification that 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:


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1.1. 1. Verb doubling ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

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 paradigmatic
example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork (a "Sesame Street" reference);
other classics include 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.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1.2. 2. Soundalike slang ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

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.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1.3. 3. The '-P' convention ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

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]


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1.4. 4. Overgeneralization ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

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 => 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 noted that the defined
plural of 'caboose' is 'cabeese', and includes an entry which implies that the
plural of 'mouse' is meeces.  On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything
ending in 'x' may form plurals in '-xen' (see VAXen and boxen in the main
text).  Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated  this
way; e.g., 'soxen' for a bunch of socks.  Other funny plurals are 'frobbotzim'
for the plural of 'frobbozz' (see frobnitz) and 'Unices' and 'Twenices' (rather
than 'Unixes' and 'Twenexes'; see UNIX, TWENEX in main text).  But note that
'Unixen' and 'Twenexen' are never used; it has been suggested that this is
because '-ix' and '-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate
plural.  Finally, it has been suggested to general approval that the plural of
'mongoose' ought to be 'polygoose'.

The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is generalization
of an inflectional rule that in English is either an import or a fossil (such
as the Hebrew plural ending '-im', or the Anglo-Saxon plural suffix '-en') to
cases where it isn't normally considered to apply.

This is not 'poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware of what
they are doing when they distort the language.  It is grammatical creativity, a
form of playfulness.  It is done not to impress but to amuse, and never at the
expense of clarity.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1.5. 5. Spoken inarticulations ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Words such as 'mumble', 'sigh', and 'groan' are spoken in places where their
referent might more naturally be used.  It has been suggested that this usage
derives from the impossibility of representing such noises on a comm link or in
electronic mail (interestingly, the same sorts of constructions have been
showing up with increasing frequency in comic strips).  Another expression
sometimes heard is "Complain!", meaning "I have a complaint!"


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1.6. 6. Anthromorphization ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency
to anthropomorphize hardware and software.  This isn't done in a naЛve way;
hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling empathy with it,
nor do they mystically believe that the things they work on every day are
'alive'. What is common is to hear hardware or software talked about as though
it has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires.
Thus, one hears "The protocol handler got confused", or that programs "are
trying" to do things, or one may say of a routine that "its goal in life is to
X".  One even hears explanations like "...  and its poor little brain couldn't
understand X, and it died."  Sometimes modelling things this way actually seems
to make them easier to understand, perhaps because it's instinctively natural
to think of anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as 'like a
person' rather than 'like a thing'.

Of the six listed constructions, verb doubling, peculiar noun formations,
anthromorphization, and (especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite
general; but punning jargon is still largely confined to MIT and other large
universities, and the '-P' convention is found only where LISPers flourish.

Finally, note that many words in hacker jargon have to be understood as members
of sets of comparatives.  This is especially true of the adjectives and nouns
used to describe the beauty and functional quality of code.  Here is an
approximately correct spectrum:

   monstrosity  brain-damage  screw  bug  lose  misfeature
   crock  kluge  hack  win  feature  elegance  perfection

The last is spoken of as a mythical absolute, approximated but never actually
attained.  Another similar scale is used for describing the reliability of
software:

   broken  flaky  dodgy  fragile  brittle
   solid  robust  bulletproof  armor-plated

Note, however, that 'dodgy' is primarily Commonwealth hackish (it is rare in
the U.S.) and may change places with 'flaky' for some speakers.

Coinages for describing lossage seem to call forth the very finest in hackish
linguistic inventiveness; it has been truly said that hackers have even more
words for equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.2. Hacker Writing Style ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing
grammatical rules.  This is one aspect of a more general fondness for
form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish
writing.  One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells 'wrong' as
'worng'.  Others have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by
observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) "This sentence no verb", or "Bad
speling", or "Incorrectspa cing." Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often
made of phrases relating to confusion or things that are confusing; 'dain
bramage' for 'brain damage' is perhaps the most common (similarly, a hacker
would be likely to write "Excuse me, I'm cixelsyd today", rather than "I'm
dyslexic today").  This sort of thing is quite common and is enjoyed by all
concerned.

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the
dismay of American editors.  Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are
"Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is
going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks".  This is incorrect according to
standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final
period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers
to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them.  Given
the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming,
American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading.  When communicating
command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in
the neck.

Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:

   Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".

Standard usage would make this

   Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd."

but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be prone to type the
string d-d-dot, and it happens that in 'vi(1)' dot repeats the last command
accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines!

The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.

Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain,
though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons
having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still
accepted there.  'Hart's Rules' and the 'Oxford Dictionary for Writers and
Editors' call the hacker-like style 'new' or 'logical' quoting.

Another hacker quirk is a tendency to distinguish between 'scare' quotes and
'speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style single quotes for marking and
reserve American-style double quotes for actual reports of speech or text
included from elsewhere.  Interestingly, some authorities describe this as
correct general usage, but mainstream American English has gone to using
double-quotes indiscriminately enough that hacker usage appears marked [and, in
fact, I thought this was a personal quirk of mine until I checked with USENET
--- ESR].  One further permutation that is definitely not standard is a hackish
tendency to do marking quotes by using apostrophes (single quotes) in pairs;
that is, 'like this'.  This is modelled on string and character literal syntax
in some programming languages (reinforced by the fact that many character-only
terminals display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a vertical single
quote).

One quirk that shows up frequently in the email style of UNIX hackers in
particular is a tendency for some things that are normally all-lowercase
(including usernames and the names of commands and C routines) to remain
uncapitalized even when they occur at the beginning of sentences.  It is clear
that, for many hackers, the case of such identifiers becomes a part of their
internal representation (the 'spelling') and cannot be overridden without
mental effort (an appropriate reflex because UNIX and C both distinguish cases
and confusing them can lead to lossage).  A way of escaping this dilemma is
simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning of sentences.

There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to the effect
that precision of expression is more important than conformance to traditional
rules; where the latter create ambiguity or lose information they can be
discarded without a second thought.  It is notable in this respect that other
hackish inventions (for example, in vocabulary) also tend to carry very precise
shades of meaning even when constructed to appear slangy and loose.  In fact,
to a hacker, the contrast between 'loose' form and 'tight' content in jargon is
a substantial part of its humor!

Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and emphasis conventions
adapted to single-font all-ASCII communications links, and these are
occasionally carried over into written documents even when normal  means of
font changes, underlining, and the like are available.

One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS 'LOUD', and this
becomes such an ingrained synesthetic reflex that a person who goes to
caps-lock while in talk mode may be asked to "stop shouting, please, you're
hurting my ears!".

Also, it is common to use bracketing with unusual characters to signify
emphasis. The asterisk is most common, as in "What the *hell*?" even though
this interferes with the common use of the asterisk suffix as a footnote mark.
The underscore is also common, suggesting underlining (this is particularly
common with book titles; for example, "It is often alleged that Joe Haldeman
wrote _The_Forever_War_ as a rebuttal to Robert Heinlein's earlier novel of the
future military, _Starship_Troopers_.").  Other forms exemplified by "=hell=",
"\hell/", or "/hell/" are occasionally seen (it's claimed that in the last
example the first slash pushes the letters over to the right to make them
italic, and the second keeps them from falling over).  Finally, words may also
be emphasized L I K E T H I S, or by a series of carets (^) under them on the
next line of the text.

There is a semantic difference between *emphasis like this* (which emphasizes
the phrase as a whole), and *emphasis* *like* *this* (which suggests the writer
speaking very slowly and distinctly, as if to a very young child or a mentally
impaired person).  Bracketing a word with the '*' character may also indicate
that the writer wishes readers to consider that an action is taking place or
that a sound is being made. Examples: *bang*, *hic*, *ring*, *grin*, *kick*,
*stomp*, *mumble*.

There is also an accepted convention for 'writing under erasure'; the text

   Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's in from corporate HQ.

would be read as "Be nice to this fool, I mean this gentleman...".  This comes
from the fact that the digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a
backspace.  It parallels (and may have been influenced by) the ironic use of
'slashouts' in science-fiction fanzines.

In a formula, '*' signifies multiplication but two asterisks in a row are a
shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN).  Thus, one might
write 2 ** 8  = 256.

Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently uses the caret (^,
ASCII 1011110); one might write instead '2^8 = 256'.  This goes all the way
back to Algol-60, which used the archaic ASCII 'up-arrow' that later became the
caret; this was picked up by Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC, which in turn
influenced the design of the 'bc(1)' and 'dc(1)' UNIX tools, which have
probably done most to reinforce the convention on USENET.  The notation is
mildly confusing to C programmers, because '^' means bitwise XOR in C.  Despite
this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of USENET. It is used
consistently in this text.

In on-line exchanges, hackers tend to use decimal forms or improper fractions
('3.5' or '7/2') rather than 'typewriter style' mixed fractions ('3-1/2').  The
major motive here is probably that the former are more readable in a monospaced
font, together with a desire to avoid the risk that the latter might be read as
'three minus one-half'.  The decimal form is definitely preferred for fractions
with a terminating decimal representation; there may be some cultural influence
here from the high status of scientific notation.

Another on-line convention, used especially for very large or very small
numbers, is taken from C (which derived it from FORTRAN).  This is a form of
'scientific notation' using 'e' to replace '*10^'; for example, one year is
about 3e7 seconds long.

The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of 'approximately'; that
is, '~50' means 'about fifty'.

On USENET and in the MUD world, common C boolean, logical, and relational
operators such as '|', '&', '||', '&&', '!', '==', '!=', '>', and '<', '>=',
and '=<' are often combined with English.  The Pascal not-equals, '<>', is also
recognized, and occasionally one sees '/=' for not-equals (from Ada, Common
Lisp, and Fortran 90).  The use of prefix '!' as a loose synonym for 'not-' or
'no-' is particularly common; thus, '!clue' is read 'no-clue' or 'clueless'.

Another habit is that of using angle-bracket enclosure to genericize a term;
this derives from conventions used in BNF.  Uses like the following are common:

   So this <ethnic> walks into a bar one day, and...

Hackers also mix letters and numbers more freely than in mainstream usage.  In
particular, it is good hackish style to write a digit sequence where you intend
the reader to understand  the text string that names that number in English.
So, hackers prefer to write '1970s' rather than 'nineteen-seventies' or
'1970's' (the latter looks like a possessive).

It should also be noted that hackers exhibit much less reluctance to use
multiply nested parentheses than is normal in English.  Part of this is almost
certainly due to influence from LISP (which uses deeply nested parentheses
(like this (see?)) in its syntax a lot), but it has also been suggested that a
more basic hacker trait of enjoying playing with complexity and pushing systems
to their limits is in operation.

One area where hackish conventions for on-line writing are still in some flux
is the marking of included material from earlier messages --- what would be
called 'block quotations' in ordinary English.  From the usual typographic
convention employed for these (smaller font at an extra indent), there derived
the notation of included text being indented by one ASCII TAB (0001001)
character, which under UNIX and many other environments gives the appearance of
an 8-space indent.

Early mail and netnews readers had no facility for including messages this way,
so people had to paste in copy manually.  BSD 'Mail(1)' was the first message
agent to support inclusion, and early USENETters emulated its style.  But the
TAB character tended to push included text too far to the right (especially in
multiply nested inclusions), leading to ugly wraparounds.  After a brief period
of confusion (during which an inclusion leader consisting of three or four
spaces became established in EMACS and a few mailers), the use of leading '>'
or '> ' became standard, perhaps owing to its use in 'ed(1)' to display tabs
(alternatively, it may derive from the '>' that some early UNIX mailers used to
quote lines starting with "From" in text, so they wouldn't look like the
beginnings of new message headers).  Inclusions within inclusions keep their
'>' leaders, so the 'nesting level' of a quotation is visually apparent.

A few other idiosyncratic quoting styles survive because they are automatically
generated.  One particularly ugly one looks like this:

/* Written hh:mm pm Mmm dd, yyyy by user@site in <group> */
/*. ---------- "Article subject, chopped to 35 ch" ---------- */
        <quoted text>
/* End of text from local:group */

It is generated by an elderly, variant news-reading system called 'notesfiles'.
The overall trend, however, is definitely away from such verbosity.

The practice of including text from the parent article when posting a followup
helped solve what had been a major nuisance on USENET: the fact that articles
do not arrive at different sites in the same order. Careless posters used to
post articles that would begin with, or even consist entirely of, "No, that's
wrong" or "I agree" or the like.  It was hard to see who was responding to
what.  Consequently, around 1984, new news-posting software evolved a facility
to automatically include the text of a previous article, marked with "> " or
whatever the poster chose.  The poster was expected to delete all but the
relevant lines. The result has been that, now, careless posters post articles
containing the entire text of a preceding article, followed only by "No, that's
wrong" or "I agree".

Many people feel that this cure is worse than the original disease, and there
soon appeared newsreader software designed to let the reader skip over included
text if desired.  Today, some posting software rejects articles containing too
high a proportion of lines beginning with '>' -- but this too has led to
undesirable workarounds, such as the deliberate inclusion of zero-content
filler lines which aren't quoted and thus pull the message below the rejection
threshold.

Because the default mailers supplied with UNIX and other operating systems
haven't evolved as quickly as human usage, the older conventions using a
leading TAB or three or four spaces are still alive; however, >-inclusion is
now clearly the prevalent form in both netnews and mail.

In 1991 practice is still evolving, and disputes over the 'correct' inclusion
style occasionally lead to holy wars.  One variant style reported uses the
citation character '|' in place of '>' for extended quotations where original
variations in indentation are being retained. One also sees different styles of
quoting a number of authors in the same message: one (deprecated because it
loses information) uses a leader of '> ' for everyone , another (the most
common) is '> > > > ', '> > > ', etc. (or '>>>> ', '>>> ', etc., depending on
line length and nesting depth) reflecting the original order of messages, and
yet another is to use a different citation leader for each author, say '> ', ':
', '| ', '} ' (preserving nesting so that the inclusion order of messages is
still apparent, or tagging the inclusions with authors' names). Yet another
style is to use each poster's initials (or login name) as a citation leader for
that poster.  Occasionally one sees a '# ' leader used for quotations from
authoritative sources such as standards documents; the intended allusion is to
the root prompt (the special UNIX command prompt issued when one is running as
the privileged super-user).

Finally, it is worth mentioning that many studies of on-line communication have
shown that electronic links have a de-inhibiting effect on people.  Deprived of
the body-language cues through which emotional state is expressed, people tend
to forget everything about other parties except what is presented over that
ASCII link.  This has both good and bad effects.  The good one is that it
encourages honesty and tends to break down hierarchical authority
relationships; the bad is that it may encourage depersonalization and
gratuitous rudeness. Perhaps in response to this, experienced netters often
display a sort of conscious formal politesse in their writing that has passed
out of fashion in other spoken and written media (for example, the phrase "Well
said, sir!" is not uncommon).

Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person communicate
with considerable fluency over the net, perhaps precisely because they can
forget on an unconscious level that they are dealing with people and thus don't
feel stressed and anxious as they would face to face.

Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters for poor spelling
or grammar, the network places a premium on literacy and clarity of expression.
It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of
the great tradition of personal letters as art.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.3. Hacker Speech Style ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful word
choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively little use of
contractions or street slang.  Dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant
attitude are highly valued --- but an underlying seriousness and intelligence
are essential.  One should use just enough jargon to communicate precisely and
identify oneself as a member of the culture; overuse of jargon or a breathless,
excessively gung-ho attitude is considered tacky and the mark of a loser.

This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally spoken by
scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical fields.  In contrast
with the methods of jargon construction, it is fairly constant throughout
hackerdom.

It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative questions ---
or, at least, that the people to whom they are talking are often confused by
the sense of their answers.  The problem is that they have done so much
programming that distinguishes between

   if (going) {

   if (!going) {

that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it seems to be asking the
opposite question from "Are you going?", and so merits an answer in the
opposite sense.  This confuses English-speaking non-hackers because they were
taught to answer as though the negative part weren't there.  In some other
languages (including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese) the hackish interpretation
is standard and the problem wouldn't arise.  Hackers often find themselves
wishing for a word like French 'si' or German 'doch' with which one could
unambiguously answer 'yes' to a negative question.

For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double
negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows them.
The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative
knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to disturb them.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.4. International Style ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage in
American English, we have made some effort to get input from abroad. Though the
hacker-speak of other languages often uses translations of jargon from English
(often as transmitted to them by earlier Jargon File versions!), the local
variations are interesting, and knowledge of them may be of some use to
travelling hackers.

There are some references herein to 'Commonwealth English'.  These are intended
to describe some variations in hacker usage as reported in the English spoken
in Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, India, etc. ---
though Canada is heavily influenced by American usage). There is also an entry
on Commonwealth Hackish reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary
differences from U.S. hackish.

Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia are reported to often
use a mixture of English and their native languages for technical conversation.
Occasionally they develop idioms in their English usage that are influenced by
their native-language styles.  Some of these are reported here.

A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they are
parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to English-speakers.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5. How to Use the Lexicon ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

                             How to Use the Lexicon


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5.1. Pronunciation Guide ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all entries that are
neither dictionary words pronounced as in standard English nor obvious
compounds thereof.  Slashes bracket phonetic pronunciations, which are to be
interpreted using the following conventions:

   1. Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or back-accent
   follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks a secondary
   accent in some words of four or more syllables).

   2. Consonants are pronounced as in American English.  The letter 'g' is
   always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); 'ch' is soft
   ("church" rather than "chemist").  The letter 'j' is the sound
   that occurs twice in "judge".  The letter 's' is always as in
   "pass", never a z sound.  The digraph 'kh' is the guttural of
   "loch" or "l'chaim".

   3. Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names; thus
   (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aitch el el/. /Z/ may
   be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.

   4. Vowels are represented as follows:

   a
      back, that
   ar
      far, mark
   aw
      flaw, caught
   ay
      bake, rain
   e
      less, men
   ee
      easy, ski
   eir
      their, software
   i
      trip, hit
   i:
      life, sky
   o
      father, palm
   oh
      flow, sew
   oo
      loot, through
   or
      more, door
   ow
      out, how
   oy
      boy, coin
   uh
      but, some
   u
      put, foot
   y
      yet, young
   yoo
      few, chew
   [y]oo
      /oo/ with optional fronting as in 'news' (/nooz/ or /nyooz/)

A /*/ is used for the 'schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded vowels (the one
that is often written with an upside-down 'e').  The schwa vowel is omitted in
syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, 'kitten' and 'color' would
be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not /kit'*n/ and /kuhl'*r/.

Entries with a pronunciation of '//' are written-only usages.  (No, UNIX
weenies, this does not mean 'pronounce like previous pronunciation'!)


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5.2. Other Lexicon Conventions ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than the
letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common in mainstream
dictionaries), except that all entries beginning with nonalphabetic characters
are sorted after Z.  The case-blindness is a feature, not a bug.

In the OS/2 rendering of the Jargon File, you will see hypertext links used to
highlight words which themselves have entries in the File.  This isn't done all
the time for every such word, but it is done everywhere that a reminder seems
useful that the term has a jargon meaning and one might wish to refer to its
entry.

Defining instances of terms and phrases appear in 'slanted type'.  A defining
instance is one which occurs near to or as part of an explanation of it.

Prefix * is used as linguists do; to mark examples of incorrect usage.

We follow the 'logical' quoting convention described in the Writing Style
section above.  In addition, we reserve double quotes for actual excerpts of
text or (sometimes invented) speech.  Scare quotes (which mark a word being
used in a nonstandard way), and philosopher's quotes (which turn an utterance
into the string of letters or words that name it) are both rendered with single
quotes.

References such as 'malloc(3)' and 'patch(1)' are to UNIX facilities (some of
which, such as 'patch(1)', are actually freeware distributed over USENET).  The
UNIX manuals use 'foo(n)' to refer to item foo in section (n) of the manual,
where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is
games, and n=8 (where present) is system administration utilities.  Sections 4,
5, and 7 of the manuals have changed roles frequently and in any case are not
referred to in any of the entries.

Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are summarized here:

abbrev.
   abbreviation
adj.
   adjective
adv.
   adverb
alt.
   alternate
cav.
   caveat
esp.
   especially
excl.
   exclamation
imp.
   imperative
interj.
   interjection
n.
   noun
obs.
   obsolete
pl.
   plural
poss.
   possibly
pref.
   prefix
prob.
   probably
prov.
   proverbial
quant.
   quantifier
suff.
   suffix
syn.
   synonym (or synonymous with)
v.
   verb (may be transitive or intransitive)
var.
   variant
vi .
   intransitive verb
vt.
   transitive verb

Where alternate spellings or pronunciations are given, alt. separates two
possibilities with nearly equal distribution, while var. prefixes one that is
markedly less common than the primary.

Where a term can be attributed to a particular subculture or is known to have
originated there, we have tried to so indicate.  Here is a list of
abbreviations used in etymologies:

Berkeley
   University of California at Berkeley
Cambridge
   the university in England (not the city in Massachusetts where
   MIT happens to be located!)
BBN
   Bolt, Beranek & Newman
CMU
   Carnegie-Mellon University
Commodore
   Commodore Business Machines
DEC
   The Digital Equipment Corporation
Fairchild
   The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto development group
Fidonet
   See the FidoNet entry
IBM
   International Business Machines
MIT
   Massachusetts Institute of Technology; esp. the legendary MIT AI Lab
   culture of roughly 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups, including the
   Tech Model Railroad Club
NYU
   New York University
IED
   The Oxford English Dictionary
Purdue
   Purdue University
SAIL
   Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (at Stanford
   University)
SI
   From SystВme International, the name for the standard
   conventions of metric nomenclature used in the sciences
Stanford
   Stanford University
Sun
   Sun Microsystems
TMRC
   Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at
   MIT c. 1960.  Material marked TMRC is from 'An Abridged Dictionary
   of the TMRC Language', originally compiled by Pete Samson in 1959
UCLA
   University of California at Los Angeles
UK
   the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland)
USENET
   See the USENET entry
WPI
   Worcester Polytechnic Institute, site of a very active community of
   PDP-10 hackers during the 1970s
XEROX PARC
   XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering research in
   user interface design and networking
Yale
   Yale University

Some other etymology abbreviations such as UNIX and PDP-10 refer to technical
cultures surrounding specific operating systems, processors, or other
environments.  The fact that a term is labelled with any one of these
abbreviations does not necessarily mean its use is confined to that culture.
In particular, many terms labelled 'MIT' and 'Stanford' are in quite general
use.  We have tried to give some indication of the distribution of speakers in
the usage notes; however, a number of factors  mentioned in the introduction
conspire to make these indications less definite than might be desirable.

A few new definitions attached to entries are marked [proposed]. These are
usually generalizations suggested by editors or USENET respondents in the
process of commenting on previous definitions of those entries. These are not
represented as established jargon.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5.3. Format For New Entries ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

All contributions and suggestions about the Jargon File will be considered
donations to be placed in the public domain as part of this File, and may be
used in subsequent paper editions.  Submissions may be edited for accuracy,
clarity and concision.

Try to conform to the format already being used --- head-words separated from
text by a colon (double colon for topic entries), cross-references in curly
brackets (doubled for topic entries), pronunciations in slashes, etymologies in
square brackets, single-space after definition numbers and word classes, etc.
Stick to the standard ASCII character set (7-bit printable, no high-half
characters or [nt]roff/TeX/Scribe escapes), as one of the versions generated
from the master file is an info document that has to be viewable on a character
tty.

We are looking to expand the file's range of technical specialties covered.
There are doubtless rich veins of jargon yet untapped in the scientific
computing, graphics, and networking hacker communities; also in numerical
analysis, computer architectures and VLSI design, language design, and many
other related fields.  Send us your jargon!

We are not interested in straight technical terms explained by textbooks or
technical dictionaries unless an entry illuminates 'underground' meanings or
aspects not covered by official histories. We are also not interested in 'joke'
entries --- there is a lot of humor in the file but it must flow naturally out
of the explanations of what hackers do and how they think.

It is OK to submit items of jargon you have originated if they have spread to
the point of being used by people who are not personally acquainted with you.
We prefer items to be attested by independent submission from two different
sites.

The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and re-posted from now on and will
include a version number.  Read it, pass it around, contribute --- this is your
monument!