Commonwealth Hackish n.
Hacker jargon as spoken in
English outside the U.S., esp. in the British Commonwealth. It
is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce
truncations like `char' and `soc', etc., as spelled (/char/,
/sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in
newsgroup names (especially two-component names) tend to be
pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather
than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix meta may be pronounced
/mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/,
zeta is usually /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred
metasyntactic variables include blurgle, eek
,
ook
, frodo
, and bilbo
; wibble,
wobble
, and in emergencies wubble
; flob
,
banana
, tom
, dick
, harry
,
wombat
, frog
, fish, womble and so on and on
(see foo, sense 4).
Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes `-o-rama', `frenzy' (as in feeding frenzy), and `city' (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!"). Finally, note that the American terms `parens', `brackets', and `braces' for (), [], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers `brackets', `square brackets', and `curly brackets'. Also, the use of `pling' for bang is common outside the United States.
See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey, fish, go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky heap, lord high fixer, loose bytes, muddie, nadger, noddy, psychedelicware, plingnet, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun lounge, terminal junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel, YABA, and notes or definitions under Bad Thing, barf, bogus, bum, chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nybble, proglet, root, SEX, tweak, womble, and xyzzy.