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The New Hacker's Dictionary Third Edition compiled by Eric S. Raymond with foreword and cartoons Guy L. Steele Jr. The MIT Press Cambridge, Mass London, England
Copyright 1993 Eric S. Raymond. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying. recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover art by Duane Bibby.
Dedication This edition is dedicated to my father, William J. Raymond, a computing pioneer who has made me proud to be a second-generation hacker. And to all the parents everywhere who have watched, amazed, as computers took their sons and daughters through a sea-change, into something rich and strange...
Disclaimer Much of the content of this book does not reflect the opinions of the editors or publishers. In fact, if you could get all the contributors to agree on anything, you'd be ready for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Guy L. Steele Jr.
I was a teen-age hacker.
When I was about twelve or so, a lab secretary at MIT who knew I was `interested in science' (it might be more accurate to say `a latent nerd' -- more on that later) arranged for one of the computer hackers there to give me an informal tour. I remember stumbling around racks full of circuit boards and wires, a screeching cabinet that printed a full page every six seconds, and rows of blinking lights; the computer room was crammed full of equipment with no obvious organization. One set of gray cabinets had some trophies and plaques sitting on it: this was the PDP-6 computer that, running a program called MacHack, won prizes playing against human players in chess tournaments. The PDP-6 also had two speakers and a stereo amplifier sitting on top of it. The hacker typed a couple of commands on a keyboard, and the PDP-6 burst into a Bach Brandenburg concerto (no. 6, as I recall).
One part of that tour stands out most clearly in my mind. I was told to sit down in front of a large, round, glass screen and was given a box that had some buttons and a stick on the top. My hacker guide typed another command on the keyboard and, suddenly, green and purple spaceships appeared on the screen! The purple one started shooting little red dots at the green one, which was soon obliterated in a multicolored shower of sparkles. The green ship was mine, and the hacker had expertly shot it down. Years later I learned that this had been a color version of Space War, one of the very first video games.
Remember that this was years before `Apple' and `TRS-80' had become household words. Back then computers were still rather mysterious, hidden away in giant corporations and university laboratories.
Playing Space War was fun, but I learned nothing of programming then. I had the true fascination of computers revealed to me in November, 1968, when a chum slipped me the news that our school (Boston Latin) had an IBM computer locked up in the basement. I was dubious. I had earlier narrowly avoided buying from a senior a ticket to the fourth-floor swimming pool (Boston Latin has only three stories, and no swimming pool at all), and assumed this was another scam. So of course I laughed in his face.
When he persisted, I checked it out. Sure enough, in a locked basement room was an IBM 1130 computer. If you want all the specs: 4096 words of memory, 16 bits per word, a 15-character-per-second Selectric (`golf ball') printer, and a card reader (model 1442) that could read 300 cards per minute. Yes, this was back in the days of punched cards. Personal computers were completely unheard of then.
Nominally the computer was for the training of juniors and seniors, but I cajoled a math teacher into lending me a computer manual and spent all of Thanksgiving vacation reading it.
I was hooked.
No doubt about it. I was born to be a hacker. Fortunately, I didn't let my studies suffer (as many young hackers do), but every spare moment I thought about the computer. It was spellbinding. I wanted to know all about it: what it could and couldn't do, how its programs worked, what its circuits looked like. During study halls, lunch, and after school, I could be found in the computer room, punching programs onto cards and running them through the computer.
I was not the only one. Very soon there was a small community of IBM 1130 hackers. We helped to maintain the computer and we tutored our less fanatical fellow students in the ways of computing. What could possibly compensate us for these chores? Free rein in the computer room.
Soon after that, I developed into one of the unauthorized but tolerated `random people' hanging around the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. A random hacker is to a computer laboratory much as a groupie is to a rock band: not really doing useful work, but emotionally involved and contributing to the ambience, if nothing else. After a while, I was haunting the computer rooms at off-hours, talking to people but more often looking for chances to run programs. Sometimes `randoms' such as I were quite helpful, operating the computers for no pay and giving advice to college students who were having trouble. Sometimes, however, we were quite a nuisance. Once I was ejected from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by none other than Richard Greenblatt, the very famous hacker who had written the MacHack program with which the PDP-6 had won its chess trophies. He threw me out because I was monopolizing the one terminal that produced letter-quality copy. (I was using the computer as a word processor to write customized form letters to various computer manufacturers, asking them to send me computer manuals.) I deserved to be tossed out and gave him no argument. But when you're hooked, you're hooked, and I was undaunted; within a week or two I was back again.
Eventually I got a part-time job as a programmer at MIT's Project MAC computer laboratory. There I became a full-fledged member of the hacker community, and ultimately an MIT graduate student.
I was never a lone hacker, but one of many. Despite stories you may have read about anti-social nerds glued permanently to display screens, totally addicted to the computer, hackers have (human) friends too. Through timesharing (where many people use one computer) and networking (where many computers are connected together), the computer makes possible a new form of human communication, better than the telephone and the postal system put together. You can send a message by electronic mail and get a reply within two minutes, or you can just link two terminals together and have a conversation. This sort of thing used to be a near-exclusive province of hackers, but is nowadays quite commonplace through commercial services such as Compuserve and GEnie.
Speaking of nerds: a hacker doesn't have to be a nerd (but it helps). More important, it is certainly not true that all nerds are hackers! Too many nerds are just nerds. But I must mention one more story from my days at MIT. When the famous National Lampoon "Are You a Nerd?" poster first came out in the mid-1970s, a secretary at MIT bought a copy to post outside her office door so everyone at the laboratory could enjoy the joke (which we did, immensely). As she was taping it up, I happened to be leaving for dinner, briefcase in hand. I glanced at the poster, then put on my glasses (heavy black frames -- I still wear them), hiked up my polyester slacks an extra half-inch, and assumed The Pose (booger and all). I matched about 80% of the itemized points: button-down shirt with loose collar, six pens in my shirt pocket, same haircut -- too bad I had left my slide rule at home. The poor secretary turned beet-red and protested, "N-no! I didn't mean you!" I just chuckled and told her that the poster artist had obviously done a remarkably good job. (Being a nerd isn't all bad -- sometimes it can turn a girl's head. Once, when I was fifteen, I was strolling across Copley Square in downtown Boston and passed three bubblegum teenyboppers. I just barely caught one of them exclaiming to her friends, "Wow! Did you see all those pens?")
Perhaps one reason for the nerd-hacker connection is that the truly dedicated hacker does little else but eat, sleep, and hack. Hackers often work strange hours that put them out of synch with normal humanity. Some hackers just get up at dinnertime and go to bed after breakfast, or perhaps get up at noon and sack out at 4 A.M. (See the terms @es{phase} and @es{night mode} for more information on hackers' sleeping schedules.) Before computers were inexpensive enough to be `personal', they had to be shared, either by taking turns or by what is called timesharing (where the computer is programmed to take turns at split-second speeds). Either way, there was heavier demand for the computer during the day than at night, because non-hacker users tended to work during the day. Hackers often therefore worked late into the evening or night, when the other computer users weren't competing for cycles. It's more fun, after all, to use the computer when it's responding at split-second speeds.
Now that personal computers and individual workstations are ubiquitous, there is less need to avoid day shifts. Many hackers, however, still find a 10 P.M.-to-6 A.M. or noon-to-8 A.M. schedule more pleasant than rising at the crack of dawn. There are different theories about why this is so: my personal one is that there is some correlation between the hackish sort of creativity and `night person' physiology. It has also been suggested that working at night is an adaptation to the hacker's need for long stretches of @es{hack mode}, a literally altered state of consciousness that doesn't tolerate distractions well; I find this eminently reasonable. Just as the VCR has allowed television watchers to `time-shift' movies, electronic mail allows the hacker to time-shift most of his communication with others, making it much less important for everyone to have exactly the same work hours.
The earliest of the hacker cultures that directly contributed to this book was the one that grew up around the PDP-1 at MIT in the early 1960s (many of these people were also in TMRC, the Tech Model Railroad Club). Later, the PDP-1 hackers formed the nucleus of the famed MIT AI Lab. Thus, when I began hacking there I connected with a tradition that was already well established, and was to continue as one of its most important sub-communities for another decade.
But MIT had no monopoly on hackers. In the 1960s and 1970s hackers congregated around any computer center that made computer time available for play. (Some of this play turned out to be very important work, but hacking is done mostly for fun, for its own sake, for the pure joy of it.) Because universities tend to be more flexible than corporations in this regard, most hackers' dens arose in university laboratories. While some of these hackers were unauthorized `random people' like me, many hackers were paid employees who chose to stay after hours and work on their own projects --- or even continue their usual work -- purely for pleasure.
The hacker community became larger and more closely knit after 1969, when the government funded a project to see whether it would be useful and practical to let the computers at dozens of universities and other sites `talk' to each other. The project succeeded and produced the famous ARPANET, a network that now links hundreds of computers across the country. Through the ARPANET researchers could share programs, trade research results, and send electronic mail -- both to individuals and to massive mailing lists. And it first allowed once-isolated hackers to talk to each other via computer. During the two decades that followed, other networks grew and connected to the ARPANET. Eventually software gave most of these a common address space; the resulting super-network, called `Internet' or simply `the net', links thousands and thousands of computers worldwide. The ARPANET itself no longer exists as a distinct entity.
The result is a worldwide hackers' community, now two decades old. In some ways the community serves as a geographically dispersed think tank; people use it to share ideas and software. One good recent example of this was during the great cold-fusion flap of 1988; many of the papers on both sides of the dispute were available on the net long before making print.
But the net also has a social importance non-hackers tend to miss. I have many friends that I have never met face to face or talked to on the telephone. I feel I know them quite well, though, because I've had extended conversations with them through the computer. (I had one friend through the computer who worked in the same building that I did, but I never knew he was deaf until I chanced to meet him face to face several months later!)
When you walk up to the terminal of a time-shared computer, the first thing you do is to `log in', that is, tell the computer who you are. As a result everyone acquires a login name, which you need to know to communicate with another hacker via computer. A login name serves in much the same way as a CB `handle'. Login names are often used as nicknames, pronounced if possible and spelled if necessary. My wife and I met at MIT, and she still calls me "Gliss" because my login name was GLS. "Guy" still sounds very weird to her, even after N years of marriage.
On the net, people are usually known by their logins and addresses. Thus, I have many friends whom I know only by login name; I have no idea what their real names are. Once, at a wedding, I ran into a good hacker friend who was also a guest there. I recalled his login name instantly, but was embarrassed that I couldn't immediately remember his real name in order to introduce him to a third person. It was `swapped out' (see @es{swap}). A more egregious example: when Barbara and I got married, we sent out wedding invitations of the usual sort without considering the consequences. One hacker friend was completely puzzled: "Barbara Kerns ... Guy Steele ... Who are these people???" His girlfriend looked over his shoulder and said, tentatively, "Guy Steele ... isn't that Quux?" This was someone I knew quite well, but he knew me only by that handle. Some hackers actually prefer to be called by their login name and seldom use their given (`mundane') names (Richard Stallman, aka RMS, is a well-known example).
In these and other ways, the working and social life of the hacker revolves primarily around the computer. This is not to say that hackers have no other interests; for a look at those, see Appendix B, @href{A Portrait of J. Random Hacker}. But hackerdom is defined by the community of interest that has grown up around computers and electronic networks. Indeed, these electronic networks have grown in importance over time.
When I drafted the first version of this preface, in 1983, I expressed some concern that hackerdom might be dying -- killed off, ironically, by the spread of knowledge about computers. As programming education became more formalized, as the personal computer atomized hacker communities previously knitted together by timesharing, and as the lure of big money in industry siphoned off some of the best and brightest, it seemed as though hackerdom's unique values might be lost.
Though these gloomy predictions were an accurate projection of some trends of that year, they didn't survive an editor's objections and never made it into the first edition. This is perhaps fortunate; now, in 1991, I am happy to report that hacking is most certainly not dead. Some of its traditional vehicles, licit and illicit, have disappeared: the PDP-10 is no longer manufactured, and improved technology and security have made phone phreaking much less intellectually rewarding. But the hacking spirit remains very much alive. The personal computer revolution has made hackers free to hack almost anywhere -- and the net is the community glue.
This book was put together almost entirely through the net. Hundreds of contributors responded to a net-wide request for new entries and updates. Eric Raymond sifted through thousands of electronic messages, collecting old and new words and cross-checking the evidence. (By the way, I got to know Eric through the net -- we worked on this project for about a year before meeting face to face.)
The New Hacker's Dictionary reflects the technological and social changes in the hacker community over the last decade or so (Eric's preface discusses some of these). At times, assisting Eric in this project has made me feel like an old fuddy-duddy; more often I have felt freshly charged with the excitement of the hacker spirit. Hackers are doing exciting new things and coining new words and phrases to describe their changing and innovative culture. If you want to get involved, interest, ability, and computer access are pretty much the only requirements; social skills help a great deal but are not mandatory. If you are just curious, this book provides a window into a strange world that may amuse or astonish you. Whichever it may be, welcome!
Happy hacking!
Eric S. Raymond
I am a hacker of a later generation than Guy Steele and the coauthors of the first edition, and my history is different from theirs in a way that illuminates the major changes that have taken place in hackerdom since that edition was published in 1983. This revised and massively expanded edition is a response to those changes, so I think a bit of my history might illuminate its whys and wherefores.
Back around 1968, I was one of the first few hundred people in the world to play a video game. I was about twelve years old, and my father (an executive for UNIVAC and himself formerly one of the very first programmers back in the days of the great electromechanical dinosaurs of the 1950s) sat me down in front of an $8 million mainframe and showed me how. The program was a demo for the UNISCOPE 3000, which many have called the first commercial video terminal. By pressing keys on the keyboard, you could drop a bomb from a little vector-graphic bomber at a stick-figure freighter sailing serenely across the cartoon sea at the bottom of the tube. If you hit (which wasn't trivial, because the bomb followed a proper parabolic trajectory) the machine would oblige with a lovely little explosion, after which the ship would break up and sink majestically beneath the waves.
I was fascinated -- even more so after they showed me the keys that allowed one to vary the speed of the bomber, the speed of the ship, and the height and angle of the bomber's passes. I quickly mastered hitting the ship and lost interest in the default settings; I spent the rest of my time there experimenting with various extreme combinations of the simulation parameters -- hacking at the program, trying to see what I could make it do. I remember being disappointed at the realization that the ship would break up in exactly the same way regardless of where the bomb hit.
It took me ten years to realize it, but that experience set my feet on the road to hackerdom. In 1972, I played BASIC games on some amazingly clunky ASR-33 teletypes hooked up to the old Dartmouth Time-Sharing System; I'll never forget the uniquely satisfying tchoonk those stiff keys made, and the musty smell and feel of the yellow paper they spooled on the carriage in huge rolls. I hadn't learned how to program yet, but DTSS included some rudimentary email/talk mode facilities and I had my first exposure to the odd and wonderful world of on-line communication there. Then, in high school around 1974, I did a little hacking on a Wang 720B `programmable calculator', a big clunky machine with a neat nixie-tube display that you could program with ditsy little punched cards; five years later it would have been called a personal computer. But what I was serious about was wanting to be a pure mathematician; all this stuff with computers was just playing around.
@looseness=1 If I'd gone to MIT, I would certainly have gravitated to the AI Lab hacker culture, which was perhaps at its most vigorous when I started college in 1976. As things turned out, I went to the University of Pennsylvania and learned hacking more or less on my own using a `borrowed' account on the Wharton School's DEC-10. When it became apparent that I'd taken on too much too soon and burned out in the math department, getting seriously into hacking seemed the most natural thing in the world. In 1978, I was mousing around on the ITS systems using a tourist account over the ARPANET; by 1979, I was handholding for APL and LISP users, making my lunch money coding for research projects, and writing a manual for UCI LISP that for all I know may still be in use at Penn. And sometime in there I got my first look at the old Jargon File. I loved it, and I spread some of the jargon around among the other expert-user and fledgling-hacker types at my site.
My first real job, in 1980, was in a LISP support group for AI research at Burroughs. But that only lasted a year, and it was after that that my career really took a turn away from what, up to then, had been the `classical' hacker growth path. I'd been one of the last generation of LISP hackers to cut my teeth on the PDP-10; and, while I was at Burroughs, I became one of the first to get involved with microcomputers. I bought an Osborne 1 and learned CP/M; a few months later, I ditched that and bought IBM PC number six-hundred-and-something.
Yes, the age of the personal computer had arrived. For the next two and a half years I toiled over TRS-80s and IBM PCs in a basement sweatshop off Walnut Street in Philadelphia. In 1983 I went to work for a startup company in the suburbs, helping write comm software to link microcomputers to VAXen and IBM mainframes. Outside, change was overtaking the AI-hacker culture that Steele & Co. had grown up in and I had briefly been part of. The DEC-10 died, displaced by the VAX; the AI Lab lost its bloom as rival groups tried to commercialize LISP and AI technology; and, almost unnoticed by the AI crowd, an operating system called UNIX was beginning to win hearts and minds out in the real world.
I'd first become intrigued by UNIX in 1974 after reading the classic Thompson and Ritchie paper in Communications of the ACM, only to have my curiosity pooh-poohed by my father's mainframe colleagues. When I moved to the 'burbs in '83 I learned C and sold my new employers on the idea of training me into their house UNIX wizard -- and that's just what I did for two and a half years. I grew into my maturity as a programmer right along with UNIX and C, watching them spread from a few niches in academic and research environments into an unstoppable tide that completely transformed the computing landscape.
The second time I saw the Jargon File was in late '83, right around the time the first edition of The Hacker's Dictionary came out --- with nary a word about C or microcomputers or UNIX or any of the areas where I knew the hottest action in computers was happening. At the time I just accepted it -- in fact, I printed out a copy and gave it to my boss as a joke, in a report folder blazoned with "UNDERSTANDING YOUR HACKER" in big letters on the outside. And then I hardly thought about it for the next six years. I was very busy programming, writing, consulting, and building a professional reputation as a UNIX expert. I was lucky; my background convinced me earlier than most that UNIX on microcomputers was going to be the wave of the commodity-computing future, so I was out front ready to catch it as it rose.
When I stumbled across the Jargon File again in early 1990, then, I saw it from a new and more confident point of view. By then, I'd known Richard Stallman for years and had brought EMACS into the UNIX shops I'd been working in. I'd grown used to seeing my own history and skills as a bridge between the `old' LISP/PDP-10/ARPANET culture and the huge newer community of C and UNIX hackers and Usenetters and personal computer hobbyists in which I'd spent most of the 1980s. I'd even originated some jargon terms myself that I'd seen pass into fairly wide use on Usenet or elsewhere (See: @es{bondage & discipline language}, @es{code-grinder}, @es{crawling horror}, @es{defenestration}, @es{drool-proof paper}, @es{fear and loathing}, @es{larval stage}, @es{nailed to the wall}, @es{quantum bogodynamics}, @es{raster burn}, @es{rice box}, @es{silly walk}).
So I called Guy Steele one day, and we hit it off well and got to talking ... and the result is this New Hacker's Dictionary you hold in your hands. It's more than just a meeting of two cultures, his and mine, because we decided to make an effort to get input from all the different technical cultures we could reach.
So although a bit over half the entries are from the C/UNIX world and many of the rest are from the ITS/LISP culture of the `old' Jargon file, there are healthy contributions from supercomputing, graphics, the compiler-design community, TCP/IP wizards, microcomputer developers, and just about everywhere else in computing where the true hacker nature is manifested.
A few days after I wrote the first version of this preface (in late April 1990), I received network mail indicating that the ITS machines were going to be shut down in the near future. These were the home of the old Jargon File and the digital heartland of the old AI-hacker culture at MIT; despite a couple of remnant ITS sites in Sweden, the decision to retire them truly marked the end of an era. They will doubtless be replaced by some conglomeration of UNIX machines -- the final sign that it's truly up to the UNIX and C community to keep the flame alive now.
We hope this expanded lexicon will be educational to fledgling hackers, thought-provoking to linguists and anthropologists, and interesting to future historians of our technological age. And we hope it helps preserve and extend the values of the hacker culture: the dedication, the irreverence, the respect for competence, and the intellectual playfulness that makes hackers such a stimulating group to be among. But most of all, we hope it will be fun.
Hackerdom's support of and the general public's response to the first edition of this book vastly exceeded our expectations. We are delighted to be able to bring you this revised and updated second edition.
The more than 250 new entries represent a quite substantial amount of fresh material. We are even more pleased to be able to include many historical and etymological additions to existing entries, many of which adduce vital facts previously unrecorded in print.
Special thanks to Pete Samson <prs@fernwood.mpk.ca.us>, compiler of the first TMRC Dictionary in 1959, for resurfacing to clarify the murky origins of several important jargon terms. In a few cases Mr. Samson's revelations overturned folk etymologies of long standing in hackerdom.
One of the goals for TNHD was to assist mainstream lexicographers and linguists in better understanding the meaning and etymology of some hackerisms which have passed into general use. We've since realized that the size and breadth of the collection might actually make it an embarrassment of riches for that audience. Accordingly, we direct the mainstream lexicographer's attention particularly to the entries for:
@es{bells and whistles}, @es{bogon}, @es{bogus}, @es{brain-dead}, @es{brute force}, @es{bug}, @es{catatonic}, @es{chad}, @es{copious free time}, @es{copyleft}, @es{cracker}, @es{cracking}, @es{crash}, @es{cruft}, @es{crufty}, @es{dark-side hacker}, @es{defenestration}, @es{dike}, @es{down}, @es{dumpster diving}, @es{fascist}, @es{fencepost error}, @es{Finagle's Law}, @es{flame}, @es{flame on}, @es{flame war}, @es{flamer}, @es{foo}, @es{foobar}, @es{frob}, @es{frobnicate}, @es{frobnitz}, @es{Get a life!}, @es{glork}, @es{gnarly}, @es{grok}, @es{guru}, @es{hack}, @es{hacker}, @es{hacker ethic}, @es{hacker humor}, @es{hacking}, @es{hex}, @es{highly}, @es{hot spot}, @es{house wizard}, @es{hung}, @es{J. Random}, @es{J. Random Hacker}, @es{jack in}, @es{jaggies}, @es{kludge}, @es{kluge}, @es{laser chicken}, @es{lose}, @es{lose lose}, @es{loser}, @es{losing}, @es{loss}, @es{lossage}, @es{luser}, @es{magic number}, @es{marginal}, @es{meta}, @es{moby}, @es{mu}, @es{mundane}, @es{mung}, @es{Murphy's Law}, @es{netter}, @es{network, the} @es{newbie}, @es{no-op}, @es{nontrivial}, @es{number-crunching}, @es{obscure}, @es{param}, @es{phreaking}, @es{ping}, @es{quux}, @es{retcon}, @es{Right Thing}, @es{scram switch}, @es{scratch}, @es{screw}, @es{signal-to-noise ratio}, @es{snarf}, @es{syntactic sugar}, @es{sysop}, @es{theory}, @es{turist}, @es{virgin}, @es{wallpaper}, @es{wedged}, @es{win}, @es{win big}, @es{win win}, @es{winnage}, @es{winner}, @es{winnitude}, @es{wizard}, @es{Wrong Thing}, @es{zap}, and @es{zapped}.
This list includes most of the hackerisms that (by 1993) have both achieved near-universal recognition in the culture and occasionally surfaced in mainstream use. A few other entries convey information of potential interest about idioms primarily used outside of hackerdom: @es{cyberpunk}, @es{cyberspace}, @es{old fart}, and @es{retcon}.
We hope these pointers will prove useful.
Happy hacking! ---ESR
It's five years after the first publication of TNHD, and the Internet seems to be taking over the world. The immense popularity of the World Wide Web has created an exploding demand for Internet services and guides to the Internet's peculiar culture, and Web or Internet-mail addresses now routinely appear on TV and in major print media. The startling success of Linux has made cheap UNIX systems accessible as never before, and the promise of technologies like Java and VRML beckons hackers all over the world to feats of inventiveness that will undoubtedly stand comparison to any in its history.
Curiously, Linux and mass access to the Internet haven't given rise to the huge efflorescence of entirely new jargon one might expect; instead, many existing jargon terms have acquired new spins and become more widely known outside of hackerdom proper. Perhaps this reflects the fact that, startling though their impact on the general public is, the new technologies have so far mostly changed relative costs and scales of activity rather than opening up domains of possibility fundamentally new to the imaginations of hard-core hackers.
Accordingly, this third edition of TNHD mainly deepens rather than broadens the lexicon; there are about a hundred new entries, but many more changes adding new meanings, background, and etymological history. One very notable such addition is divided between the entries for @es{kluge} and @es{kludge} and may settle in a rather startling way the longstanding culture wars over the spelling of these words.
The culture of hackerdom continues to be a fascinating scene to observe and be part of. One of the most interesting things to watch is how it is responding to the massive wave of popular interest in the Internet, and how popular culture itself is beginning to be subtly reshaped by the technology of the Internet and the culture of the hackers who maintain it. In the age of the "information superhighway" TNHD is more relevant, and more needed, than ever before. The next five years should be very interesting.
---ESR
@include online.tex We invite people to send us URLs for resources (such as documents, FTP locations, mailing-list addresses, etc.) relevant to Jargon File entries.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 40 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 @es{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 @d{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 @es{kluge} and an @es{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.
Hacker slang also challenges some common linguistic and anthropological assumptions. For example, it has recently become fashionable to speak of `low-context' versus `high-context' communication, and to classify cultures by the preferred context level of their languages and art forms. It is usually claimed that low-context communication (characterized by precision, clarity, and completeness of self-contained utterances) is typical in cultures which value logic, objectivity, individualism, and competition; by contrast, high-context communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded) is associated with cultures which value subjectivity, consensus, cooperation, and tradition. What then are we to make of hackerdom, which is themed around extremely low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily "low-context" values, but cultivates an almost absurdly high-context slang style?
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 slang definitions.
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, @href{Hacker Folklore}. The `outside' reader's attention is particularly directed to Appendix B, @href{A Portrait of J. Random Hacker}. Appendix C, the @href{Bibliography}, lists some 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.
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 hacker slang is traditionally `the jargon'. When talking about the jargon there is therefore no convenient way to distinguish it from 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 hacker 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:
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 @href{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.
Despite these problems, the organized collection of jargon-related oral history for the new compilations has enabled us to put to rest quite a number of folk etymologies, place credit where credit is due, and illuminate the early history of many important hackerisms such as @es{kluge}, @es{cruft}, and @es{foo}. We believe specialist lexicographers will find many of the historical notes more than casually instructive.
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 (@es{frob} and some senses of @es{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, @es{FTP}ed 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 `>' caused versioning under ITS) 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 Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly (issue 29, 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 @es{TWENEX} system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved @es{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 @es{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 hacker 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 @href{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 @es{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 <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> maintains the new File with assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr. <gls@think.com>; 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 jargon@thyrsus.com.
(Warning: other email addresses appear in this file but are not guaranteed to be correct after date of publication. Don't email us if an attempt to reach someone bounces -- we have no magic way of checking addresses or looking up people.)
Please try to review a recent copy of the on-line document before submitting entries; it should be available at major archive sites. It may contain new material not recorded in this paper snapshot that could save you some typing. It also includes some submission guidelines not reproduced here.
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 <jn11+@andrew.cmu.edu>, Bernie Cosell <cosell@bbn.com>, Earl Boebert <boebert@SCTC.com>, and Joe Morris <jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org>.
We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished linguists. David Stampe <stampe@hawaii.edu> and Charles Hoequist <hoequist@bnr.ca> contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane <jgk@osc.osc.com> helped us improve the pronunciation guides.
A few bits of this text quote previous works. We are indebted to Brian A. LaMacchia <bal@zurich.ai.mit.edu> for obtaining permission for us to use material from the TMRC Dictionary; also, Don Libes <libes@cme.nist.gov> contributed some appropriate material from his excellent book Life With UNIX. We thank Per Lindberg <per@front.se>, 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 <Marc_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com> 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 <msb@sq.com> and Steve Summit <scs@eskimo.com> to the File and Dictionary; they have read and reread many drafts, checked facts, caught typos, submitted an amazing number of thoughtful comments, and done yeoman service in catching typos and minor usage bobbles. Their rare combination of enthusiasm, persistence, wide-ranging technical knowledge, and precisionism in matters of language has been of invaluable help. Indeed, the sustained volume and quality of Mr. Brader's input over several years and several different editions has only allowed him to escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of margins.
Finally, George V. Reilly <georgere@microsoft.com> helped with TeX arcana and painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions, and Eric Tiedemann <est@thyrsus.com> contributed sage advice throughout on rhetoric, amphigory, and philosophunculism.
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 verb doubling, soundalike slang, the `-P' convention, overgeneralization, spoken inarticulations, and anthropomorphization. Each is discussed below. We also cover the standard comparatives for design quality.
Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization, anthropomorphization, and (especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite general; but soundalike slang is still largely confined to MIT and other large universities, and the `-P' convention is found only where LISPers flourish.
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 @es{win}, @es{lose}, @es{hack}, @es{flame}, @es{barf}, @es{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 @es{Usenet} culture has one tripling convention unrelated to this; the names of @sq{joke} topic groups often have a tripled last element. The first and paradigmatic example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork (a @qcite{Muppet Show} reference); other infamous examples have included:
alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg
alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk
sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom
alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill
Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered particularly @es{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.
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 @es{T} and @es{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 @es{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]
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 @es{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.
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 @es{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 @es{VAXen} and @es{boxen} in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic @p{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 @es{frobnitz}) and `Unices' and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see @es{Unix}, @es{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.
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!"
Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. This isn't done in a naive 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'.
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 @es{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.
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 "Too repetetetive", 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 @es{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 habit 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 @es{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 @es{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 @es{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*.
One might also see the above sound effects as <bang>, <hic>, <ring>, <grin>, <kick>, <stomp>, <mumble>. This use of angle brackets to mark their contents originally derives from conventions used in @es{BNF}, but since about 1993 it has been reinforced by the HTML markup used on the World Wide Web.
Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term stands for some @es{random} member of a larger class (this is straight from @es{BNF}). Examples like the following are common:
So this <ethnic> walks into a bar one day...
There is also an accepted convention for `writing under erasure'; the text
Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ.
reads roughly as "Be nice to this fool, er, 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.
A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to previous text. This custom is fading as more mailers get good editing capabilities, but one occasionally still sees things like this:
I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often. Send it to Erik for the File. Oops...s/Erik/Eric/.
The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding". This
syntax is borrowed from the Unix editing tools ed and
sed, but is widely recognized by non-Unix hackers as well.
In a formula, * signifies multiplication but two asterisks in a
row are a shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN).
Thus, one might write @Math{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 exclusive-or in
C. Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot
of Usenet. It is used consistently in this lexicon.
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
The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of `approximately'; that is, `~50' means @d{about fifty}.
On Usenet and in the @es{MUD} world, common C boolean, logical, and relational operators such as `|', `&', `||', `&&', `!', `==', `!=', `>', `<', `>=', 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'.
A related practice borrows syntax from preferred programming languages to express ideas in a natural-language text. For example, one might see the following:
In <jrh578689@thudpucker.com> J. R. Hacker wrote:
>I recently had occasion to field-test the Snafu
>Systems 2300E adaptive gonkulator. The price was
>right, and the racing stripe on the case looked
>kind of neat, but its performance left something
>to be desired.
Yeah, I tried one out too.
#ifdef FLAME
Hasn't anyone told those idiots that you can't get
decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today's
net volumes?
#endif /* FLAME */
I guess they figured the price premium for true
frame-based semantic analysis was too high.
Unfortunately, it's also the only workable approach.
I wouldn't recommend purchase of this product unless
you're on a *very* tight budget.
#include <disclaimer.h>
--
== Frank Foonly (Fubarco Systems)
In the above, the #ifdef/#endif pair is a conditional
compilation syntax from C; here, it implies that the text between
(which is a @es{flame}) should be evaluated only if you have turned on
(or defined on) the switch FLAME. The #include at the end is C
for "include standard disclaimer here"; the `standard disclaimer' is
understood to read, roughly, "These are my personal opinions and not
to be construed as the official position of my employer."
The top section in the example, with > at the left margin, is an example of an inclusion convention we'll discuss below.
More recently, following on the huge popularity of the World Wide Web, pseudo-HTML markup has become popular for similar purposes:
<flame> Your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries! </flame>
You'll even see this with an HTML-style modifier:
<flame intensity="100%"> You seem well-suited for a career in government. </flame>
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.
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. A good one is that it encourages honesty and tends to break down hierarchical authority relationships; a bad one 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.
One area where 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 a practice 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.
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.
Inclusion practice is still evolving, and disputes over the `correct' inclusion style occasionally lead to @es{holy wars}.
Most netters view an inclusion as a promise that comment on it will immediately follow. The preferred, conversational style looks like this,
> relevant excerpt 1
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 2
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 3
response to excerpt
or for short messages like this:
> entire message
response to message
Thanks to poor design of some PC-based mail agents, one will occasionally see the entire quoted message after the response, like this
response to message
> entire message
but this practice is strongly deprecated.
Though `>' remains the standard inclusion leader, `|' is occasionally used for extended quotations where original variations in indentation are being retained (one mailer even combines these and uses `|>'). 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).
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 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. 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!").
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 @et{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 @d{scrollare} (to scroll) and @d{deletare} (to delete) rather than native Italian @ta{scorrere} and @ta{cancellare}. Similarly, the English verb `to hack' has been seen conjugated in Swedish. 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.
From the late 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards has been developing separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of @d{pirate boards} inhabited by @es{cracker}s, phone phreaks, and @es{warez d00dz}. These people (mostly teenagers running 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 @es{warez d00dz} usage:
phone => fone
freak => phreak
are obligatory.
These traits are similar to those of @es{B1FF}, who originated as a parody of naive BBS users. For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see @es{lamer}, @es{elite}, @es{leech}, @es{poser}, @es{cracker}, and especially @es{warez d00dz}.
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:
The glyph @p{*} is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded vowels. The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, `kitten' and `color' would be rendered @p{kit'n} and @p{kuhl'r}, not @p{kit'*n} and @p{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 consonents 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 `@p{}' are written-only usages. (No, Unix weenies, this does not mean `pronounce like previous pronunciation'!)
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.
Jargon terms with entries in the file are boldfaced. 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 @d{slanted type}. A defining instance is one which occurs near to or as part of an explanation of it.
Prefixed ** 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 (@Math{n}) of the
manual, where @Math{n=1} is utilities, @Math{n=2} is system calls,
@Math{n=3} is C library routines, @Math{n=6} is games, and
@Math{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:
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:
Some other etymology abbreviations such as @es{Unix} and @es{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.
You can mail submissions for the Jargon File to jargon@snark.thyrsus.com.
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 in the ASCII on-line version --- 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.
An HTML version of the File is available at http://www.ccil.org/jargon. Please send us URLs for materials related to the entries, so we can enrich the File's link structure.
The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and made available for browsing on the World Wide Web, and will include a version number. Read it, pass it around, contribute -- this is your monument!
@hd{abbrev} @p{*-breev'}, @p{*-brev'} @g{n.} @tl{} Common abbreviation for @q{abbreviation}.
@hd{ABEND} @p{a'bend}, @p{*-bend'} @g{n.} @tl{} [ABnormal END] Abnormal termination (of software); @es{crash}; @es{lossage}. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by @es{code grinder}s. Usually capitalized, but may appear as @q{abend}. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called @d{abend} because it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German `Abend' = `Evening'.
@hd{accumulator} @g{n. obs.} @tl{} 1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for @ta{register} is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in `A' derive from historical use of the term @ta{accumulator} (and not, actually, from @q{arithmetic}). Confusingly, though, an `A' register name prefix may also stand for @ta{address}, as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. 2. A register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context of a particular routine or stretch of code. "The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an accumulator." 3. One's in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1). "You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the accumulator." (See @es{stack}.)
@hd{ACK} @p{ak} @g{interj.} @tl{} 1. [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream Yo!). An appropriate response to @es{ping} or @es{ENQ}. 2. [from the comic strip @qcite{Bloom County}] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in "Ack pffft!" Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following exclamation point. 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point (see @es{NAK}). Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation with "Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now".
There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense 1) meaning "Are you there?", often used in email when earlier mail has produced no reply, or during a lull in @es{talk mode} to see if the person has gone away (the standard humorous response is of course @es{NAK} (sense 2), i.e., "I'm not here").
@hd{Acme} @g{n.} @tl{} The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry -- where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson shop. Describing some X as an "Acme X" either means "This is @es{insanely great}", or, more likely, "This looks @es{insanely great} on paper, but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it." Compare @es{pistol}.
This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers' series of "Roadrunner" cartoons. In these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Roadrunner. His attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube Goldberg devices -- rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered in large cardboard boxes, labeled prominently with the Acme name. These devices invariably malfunctioned in violent and improbable ways.
@hd{acolyte} @g{n. obs.} @tl{} [TMRC] An @es{OSU} privileged enough to submit data and programs to a member of the @es{priesthood}.
@hd{ad-hockery} @p{ad-hok'*r-ee} @g{n.} @tl{} [Purdue] 1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent behavior but are in fact entirely arbitrary. For example, fuzzy-matching of input tokens that might be typing errors against a symbol table can make it look as though a program knows how to spell. 2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input that would otherwise cause a program to @es{choke}, presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way. Also called @d{ad-hackery}, @d{ad-hocity} (@p{ad-hos'*-tee}), @d{ad-crockery}. See also @es{ELIZA effect}.
@hdt{Ada} @g{n.} @tl{} A @et{Pascal}-descended language that has been made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description is "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first programmer while cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of his mechanical computing engines in the mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside its vast, @es{elephantine} bulk.
@hd{adger} @p{aj'r} @g{vt.} @tl{} [UCLA mutant of @es{nadger}, poss. from the middle name of an infamous @es{tenured graduate student}] To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen with even slight mental effort. E.g., "He started removing files and promptly adgered the whole project". Compare @es{dumbass attack}.
@hd{admin} @p{ad-min'} @g{n.} @tl{} Short for @q{administrator}; very commonly used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common constructions on this include @d{sysadmin} and @d{site admin} (emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or @d{newsadmin} (focusing specifically on news). Compare @es{postmaster}, @es{sysop}, @es{system mangler}.
@hd{ADVENT} @p{ad'vent} @g{n.} @tl{} The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the @es{PDP-10} in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. Now better known as Adventure, but the @et{TOPS-10} operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. See also @es{vadding}, @es{Zork}, and @es{Infocom}.
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different." The @sq{magic words} @es{xyzzy} and @es{plugh} also derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually has a `Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance. ADVENT sources are available for FTP at @ftp{//ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z}.
@hd{AFAIK} @p{} @g{n.} @tl{} [Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know".
@hd{AFJ} @p{} @g{n.} @tl{} Written-only abbreviation for "April Fool's Joke". Elaborate April Fool's hoaxes are a long-established tradition on Usenet and Internet; see @es{kremvax} for an example. In fact, April Fool's Day is the only seasonal holiday consistently marked by customary observances on Internet and other hacker networks.
@hd{AI} @p{A-I} @g{n.} @tl{} Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.
@hd{AI-complete} @p{A-I k*m-pleet'} @g{adj.} @tl{} [MIT, Stanford: by analogy with @ta{NP-complete} (see @es{NP-})] Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the `strong AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard.
Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem' (building a system that can see as well as a human) and `The Natural Language Problem' (building a system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1996) to solve them have foundered on the amount of context information and @sq{intelligence} they seem to require. See also @es{gedanken}.
@hd{AI koans} @p{A-I koh'anz} @g{pl.n.} @tl{} A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture (several are included under @href{AI Koans} in Appendix A). See also @es{ha ha only serious}, @es{mu}, and @et{hacker humor}.
@hd{AIDS} @p{aydz} @g{n.} @tl{} Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*' is a @es{glob} pattern that matches, but is not limited to, Apple or Amiga), this condition is quite often the result of practicing unsafe @es{SEX}. See @es{virus}, @es{worm}, @es{Trojan horse}, @es{virgin}.
@hd{AIDX} @p{ayd'k*z} @g{n.} @tl{} Derogatory term for IBM's perverted version of Unix, AIX, especially for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM RS/6000 series (some hackers think it is funnier just to pronounce "AIX" as "aches"). A victim of the dreaded "hybridism" disease, this attempt to combine the two main currents of the Unix stream (@es{BSD} and @es{USG Unix}) became a @es{monstrosity} to haunt system administrators' dreams. For example, if new accounts are created while many users are logged on, the load average jumps quickly over 20 due to silly implementation of the user databases. For a quite similar disease, compare @es{HP-SUX}. Also, compare @es{Macintrash}, @es{Nominal Semidestructor}, @es{Open DeathTrap}, @es{ScumOS}, @es{sun-stools}.
@hd{airplane rule} @g{n.} @tl{} "Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket. See also @es{KISS Principle}.
@hd{aliasing bug} @g{n.} @tl{} A class of subtle programming errors that
can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via
malloc(3) or equivalent. If several pointers address
(@d{aliases for}) a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the
storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias
and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and
possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the
allocation history of the malloc @es{arena}. Avoidable by use of
allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by use of
higher-level languages, such as @es{LISP}, which employ a garbage
collector (see @es{GC}). Also called a @es{stale pointer bug}.
See also @es{precedence lossage}, @es{smash the stack},
@es{fandango on core}, @es{memory leak}, @es{memory smash},
@es{overrun screw}, @es{spam}.
Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s.
@hd{all-elbows} @g{adj.} @tl{} [MS-DOS] Of a TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident) IBM PC program, such as the @Math{N} pop-up calendar and calculator utilities that circulate on @es{BBS} systems: unsociable. Used to describe a program that rudely steals the resources that it needs without considering that other TSRs may also be resident. One particularly common form of rudeness is lock-up due to programs fighting over the keyboard interrupt. See @es{rude}, also @es{mess-dos}.
@hd{alpha particles} @g{n.} @tl{} See @es{bit rot}.
@hd{alt} @p{awlt} @tl{} 1. @g{n.} The alt shift key on an IBM PC or @es{clone} keyboard; see @es{bucky bits}, sense 2 (though typical PC usage does not simply set the 0200 bit). 2. @g{n.} The @sq{clover} or `Command' key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also @es{feature key}). Some Mac hackers, confusingly, reserve `alt' for the Option key (and it is so labeled on some Mac II keyboards). 3. @g{n.,obs}. [PDP-10; often capitalized to ALT] Alternate name for the ASCII ESC character (ASCII 0011011), after the keycap labeling on some older terminals; also @d{altmode} (@p{awlt'mohd}). This character was almost never pronounced @q{escape} on an ITS system, in @es{TECO}, or under TOPS-10 -- always alt, as in "Type alt alt to end a TECO command" or "alt-U onto the system" (for "log onto the [ITS] system"). This usage probably arose because alt is more convenient to say than @q{escape}, especially when followed by another alt or a character (or another alt and a character, for that matter). 4. The @a{alt} hierarchy on Usenet, the tree of newsgroups created by users without a formal vote and approval procedure. There is a myth, not entirely implausible, that @a{alt} is acronymic for "anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists"; but in fact it is simply short for "alternative".
@hd{alt bit} @p{awlt bit} [from alternate] @g{adj.} @tl{} See @es{meta bit}.
@hd{altmode} @g{n.} @tl{} Syn. @es{alt} sense 3.
@hd{Aluminum Book} @g{n.} @tl{} [MIT] Common LISP: The Language, by Guy L. Steele Jr. (Digital Press, first edition 1984, second edition 1990). Note that due to a technical screwup some printings of the second edition are actually of a color the author describes succinctly as "yucky green". See also @et{book titles}.
@hd{amoeba} @g{n.} @tl{} Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer.
@hd{amp off} @g{vt.} @tl{} [Purdue] To run in @es{background}. From the Unix shell `&' operator.
@hd{amper} @g{n.} @tl{} Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand (`&', ASCII 0100110) character. See @et{ASCII} for other synonyms.
@hd{angle brackets} @g{n.} @tl{} Either of the characters `<' (ASCII 0111100) and `>' (ASCII 0111110) (ASCII less-than or greater-than signs). Typographers in the @es{Real World} use angle brackets which are either taller and slimmer (the ISO `Bra' and `Ket' characters), or significantly smaller (single or double guillemets) than the less-than and greater-than signs. See @es{broket}, @et{ASCII}.
@hd{angry fruit salad} @g{n.} @tl{} A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. (This term derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in canned fruit salad.) Too often one sees similar effects from interface designers using color window systems such as @es{X}; there is a tendency to create displays that are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term use.
@hd{annoybot} @p{*-noy-bot} @g{n.} @tl{} [IRC] See @es{robot}.
@hd{ANSI} @p{an'see} @tl{} 1. @g{n.} [techspeak] The American National Standards Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization for Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language (see @es{K&R}, @es{Classic C}), and promulgates many other important software standards. 2. @g{n.} [techspeak] A terminal may be said to be `ANSI' if it meets the ANSI X.364 standard for terminal control. Unfortunately, this standard was both over-complicated and too permissive. It has been retired and replaced by the ECMA-48 standard, which shares both flaws. 3. @g{n.} [BBS jargon] The set of screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS and Amiga computers accept. This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that must be loaded on an MS-DOS computer to view such codes. Unfortunately, neither DOS ANSI nor the BBS ANSIs derived from it exactly match the ANSI X.364 terminal standard. For example, the ESC-[1m code turns on the bold highlight on large machines, but in IBM PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on `intense' (bright) colors. Also, in BBS-land, the term `ANSI' is often used to imply that a particular computer uses or can emulate the IBM high-half character set from MS-DOS. Particular use depends on context. Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set is used with the color codes, but on BBSs, ANSI and `IBM characters' tend to go together.
@hd{AOS} 1. @p{aws} (East Coast), @p{ay'os} (West Coast) @g{vt. obs.} @tl{} To increase the amount of something. "AOS the campfire." [based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] Usage: considered silly, and now obsolete. Now largely supplanted by @es{bump}. See @es{SOS}. 2. @g{n.} A @et{Multics}-derived OS supported at one time by Data General. This was pronounced @p{A-O-S} or @p{A-os}. A spoof of the standard AOS system administrator's manual (How to Load and Generate your AOS System) was created, issued a part number, and circulated as photocopy folklore; it was called How to Goad and Levitate your CHAOS System. 3. @g{n.} Algebraic Operating System, in reference to those calculators which use infix instead of postfix (reverse Polish) notation. 4. A @es{BSD}-like operating system for the IBM RT.
Historical note: AOS in sense 1 was the name of a @es{PDP-10} instruction that took any memory location in the computer and added 1 to it; AOS meant `Add One and do not Skip'. Why, you may ask, does the `S' stand for `do not Skip' rather than for `Skip'? Ah, here was a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight such instructions: AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction if the result was Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if the result was Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped if the result was Not 0; AOSA added 1 and then skipped Always; and so on. Just plain AOS didn't say when to skip, so it never skipped.
For similar reasons, AOJ meant `Add One and do not Jump'. Even more bizarre, SKIP meant `do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the next instruction, you had to say `SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant `do not JUMP'; the unconditional form was JUMPA. However, hackers never did this. By some quirk of the 10's design, the @es{JRST} (Jump and ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster and so was invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of assembler programming.
@hd{app} @p{ap} @g{n.} @tl{} Short for @q{application program}, as opposed to a systems program. Apps are what systems vendors are forever chasing developers to create for their environments so they can sell more boxes. Hackers tend not to think of the things they themselves run as apps; thus, in hacker parlance the term excludes compilers, program editors, games, and messaging systems, though a user would consider all those to be apps. (Broadly, an app is often a self-contained environment for performing some well-defined task such as `word processing'; hackers tend to prefer more general-purpose tools.) See @es{killer app}; oppose @es{tool}, @es{operating system}.
@hd{arena} [Unix] @g{n.} @tl{} The area of memory attached to a process by
brk(2) and sbrk(2) and used by malloc(3) as
dynamic storage. So named from a malloc: corrupt arena
message emitted when some early versions detected an impossible
value in the free block list. See @es{overrun screw}, @es{aliasing
bug}, @es{memory leak}, @es{memory smash}, @es{smash the stack}.
@hd{arg} @p{arg} @g{n.} @tl{} Abbreviation for @q{argument} (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like @q{piano} from @q{pianoforte}). "The sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args." Compare @es{param}, @es{parm}, @es{var}.
@hd{ARMM} @g{n.} @tl{} [acronym, @q{Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation}] A Usenet robot created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 31, 1993 and proceeded to @es{spam} news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over 200 messages.
ARMM's bug produced a recursive @es{cascade} of messages each of which mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer.
Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also establishing the term @es{despew}), and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network. Compare @es{Great Worm, the}; @es{sorcerer's apprentice mode}. See also @es{software laser}, @es{network meltdown}.
@hd{armor-plated} @g{n.} @tl{} Syn. for @es{bulletproof}.
@hd{asbestos} @g{adj.} @tl{} Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one from @es{flame}s; also in other highly @es{flame}-suggestive