To register for an Internet.com membership to receive newsletters and white papers, use the Register button ABOVE.
To participate in the message forums BELOW, click here
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/). The prefix meta may be pronounced
/mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/,
zeta is usually /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred
metasyntactic variables 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!"). Finally, note
that the American terms `parens', `brackets', and `braces' for (),
[], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers
`brackets', `square brackets', and `curly brackets'. Also, the
use of `pling' for bang is common outside the United States.
