The Jargon File by Eric S. Raymond (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

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).

Node:Hacker Speech Style, Next:[133]International Style,

Previous:[134]Email Quotes, Up:[135]Top

Hacker Speech Style

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) ...

and

if (!going) ...

that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it may seem to

be asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so to merit

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', Germandoch', or Dutch `jawel' - a word with

which one could unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question.

(See also [136]mu)

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.

In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering

questions containing logical connectives with a strictly literal

rather than colloquial interpretation. A non-hacker who is indelicate

enough to ask a question like "So, are you working on finding that bug

now or leaving it until later?" is likely to get the perfectly correct

answer "Yes!" (that is, "Yes, I'm doing it either now or later, and

you didn't ask which!").

Node:International Style, Next:[137]Lamer-speak, Previous:[138]Hacker

Speech Style, Up:[139]Top

International Style

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 hackish'. 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 [140]Commonwealth Hackish

reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary differences from U.S.

hackish.

Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report that

they 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.

On the other hand, English often gives rise to grammatical and

vocabulary mutations in the native language. For example, Italian

hackers often use the nonexistent verbs `scrollare' (to scroll) and

deletare' (to delete) rather than native Italianscorrere' and

cancellare'. Similarly, the English verbto hack' has been seen

conjugated in Swedish. In German, many Unix terms in English are

casually declined as if they were German verbs - thus:

mount/mounten/gemountet; grep/grepen/gegrept; fork/forken/geforkt;

core dump/core-dumpen, core-gedumpt. And Spanish-speaking hackers use

linkar' (to link),debugear' (to debug), and `lockear' (to lock).

European hackers report that this happens partly because the English

terms make finer distinctions than are available in their native

vocabularies, and partly because deliberate language-crossing makes

for amusing wordplay.

A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they

are parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to

English-speakers.

Node:Lamer-speak, Next:[141]Pronunciation Guide,

Previous:[142]International Style, Up:[143]Top

Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers

From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local,

MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet

hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of

`pirate boards' inhabited by [144]crackers, phone phreaks, and

[145]warez d00dz. These people (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones

from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon,

heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.

Though crackers often call themselves `hackers', they aren't (they

typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet

expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems).

Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's. Nevertheless,

this lexicon covers much of it so the reader will be able to

understand what goes by on bulletin-board systems.

Here is a brief guide to cracker and [146]warez d00dz usage:

Misspell frequently. The substitutions

phone => fone

freak => phreak

are obligatory.

Always substitute z's fors's. (i.e. "codes" -> "codez"). The

substitution of 'z' for 's' has evolved so that a 'z' is bow

systematically put at the end of words to denote an illegal or

cracking connection. Examples : Appz, passwordz, passez, utilz,

MP3z, distroz, pornz, sitez, gamez, crackz, serialz, downloadz,

FTPz, etc.

Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey

Dudes!#!$#$!#!$").

Use the emphatic `k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome")

frequently.

Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").

Substitute 0' foro' ("r0dent", "l0zer").

TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE

TIME.

These traits are similar to those of [147]B1FF, who originated as a

parody of naive [148]BBS users; also of his latter-day equivalent

[149]Jeff K.. Occasionally, this sort of distortion may be used as

heavy sarcasm by a real hacker, as in:

I got X Windows running under Linux!

d00d! u R an 31337 hax0r

The only practice resembling this in actual hacker usage is the

substitution of a dollar sign of `s' in names of products or service

felt to be excessively expensive, e.g. Compu$erve, Micro$oft.

For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see [150]lamer,

[151]elite, [152]leech, [153]poser, [154]cracker, and especially

[155]warez d00dz, [156]banner site, [157]ratio site, [158]leech mode.

Node:Pronunciation Guide, Next:[159]Other Lexicon Conventions,

Previous:[160]Lamer-speak, Up:[161]Top

How to Use the Lexicon

Pronunciation Guide

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:

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). If no

accent is given, the word is pronounced with equal accentuation on

all syllables (this is common for abbreviations).

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". The digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of "bughouse" or

"ragheap" (rare in English).

Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names;

thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/. /Z/ may

be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.

Vowels are represented as follows:

/a/

back, that

/ah/

father, palm (see note)

/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/

block, stock (see note)

/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/)

The glyph /*/ 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' andcolor' would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/,

not /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/.

Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found in

standard American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken by TV

network announcers and typical of educated speech in the Upper

Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia). However, we

separate /o/ from /ah/, which tend to merge in standard American. This

may help readers accustomed to accents resembling British Received

Pronunciation.

The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as possible to

map the pronunciations into their local dialect by ignoring some

subset of the distinctions we make. Speakers of British RP, for

example, can smash terminal /r/ and all unstressed vowels. Speakers of

many varieties of southern American will automatically map /o/ to

/aw/; and so forth. (Standard American makes a good reference dialect

for this purpose because it has crisp consonants and more vowel

distinctions than other major dialects, and tends to retain

distinctions between unstressed vowels. It also happens to be what

your editor speaks.)

Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages. (No,

Unix weenies, this does not mean `pronounce like previous

pronunciation'!)

Node:Other Lexicon Conventions, Next:[162]Format for New Entries,

Previous:[163]Pronunciation Guide, Up:[164]Top

Other Lexicon Conventions

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.

The beginning of each entry is marked by a colon (:) at the left

margin. This convention helps out tools like hypertext browsers that

benefit from knowing where entry boundaries are, but aren't as

context-sensitive as humans.

In pure ASCII renderings of the Jargon File, you will see {} used to

bracket 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.

In this