Commonwealth Hackish

Commonwealth Hackish

Hacker jargon as spoken outside the US, especially in theBritish Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealthspeakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like "char"and "soc", etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed toAmerican /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names(especially two-component names) tend to be pronounced moreoften (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather than /sohshwib'l/). The prefix meta may be pronounced /mee't*/;similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/, zeta isusually /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred metasyntactic variables include blurgle, "eek", "ook", "frodo", and"bilbo"; "wibble", "wobble", and in emergencies "wubble";"banana", "tom", "dick", "harry", "wombat", "frog", fish,and so on and on (see foo).

Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes "-o-rama","frenzy" (as in feeding frenzy), and "city" (examples: "barfcity!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!"). Finally, notethat 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 UnitedStates.

See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey, fish, go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek,heavy metal, leaky heap, lord high fixer, loose bytes,muddie, nadger, noddy, psychedelicware, plingnet,raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun lounge,terminal junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel,YABA, and notes or definitions under Bad Thing, barf,bum, chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware,crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily,mess-dos, nibble, proglet, root, SEX, tweak, andxyzzy.