The Hackers" Dictionary.
by Eric S. Raymond.
Introduction:
:About This File: == This doc.u.ment 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 35 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 {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 "trompe l"oeil" compositions (Escher is a favorite of hackers), and hacker slang encodes these subtleties in many un.o.bvious ways. As a simple example, take the distinction between a {kluge} and an {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 a.s.serts 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.Hackish slang also challenges some common linguistic and anthropological a.s.sumptions. For example, it has recently become fashionable to speak of "low-context" versus "high-context" communication, and to cla.s.sify 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 compet.i.tion; by contrast, high-context communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded) is a.s.sociated 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 entries.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 pa.s.sionate; 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 doc.u.ment"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}. The "outside" reader"s attention is particularly directed to {appendix B}, "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker". {Appendix C} is a bibliography of 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.:Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak: ========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 hackish slang is traditionally "the jargon". When talking about the jargon there is therefore no convenient way to distinguish 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 hackish 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: *"slang": informal language from mainstream English or non-technicalsubcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc). *"jargon": without qualifier, denotes informal "slangy" languagepeculiar to hackers --- the subject of this lexicon. *"techspeak": the formal technical vocabulary of programming, computerscience, electronics, and other fields connected to hacking.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 "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 doc.u.ments.A few obviously techspeak terms (names of operating systems, languages, or doc.u.ments) 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.:Revision History: ===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 Inst.i.tute (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 ({frob} and some senses of {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, {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 ">" means numbered with a version number) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr. Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, n.o.body 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 Russell Brand"s "CoEvolution Quarterly" (pages 26-35) with ill.u.s.trations 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 ma.s.s 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 Ma.s.sachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a {TWENEX} system rather than a host for the AI hackers" beloved {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 {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 hackish 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 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 pa.s.sed from living doc.u.ment 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 {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 maintains the new File with a.s.sistance from Guy L. Steele Jr. [email protected]>; 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 [email protected] (UUCP-only sites without connections to an autorouting smart site can use ...!uunet!snark!jargon).(Warning: other email addresses appear in this file *but are not guaranteed to be correct* later than the revision date on the first line. *Don"t* email us if an attempt to reach your idol bounces --- we have no magic way of checking addresses or looking up people.)The 2.9.6 version became the main text of "The New Hacker"s Dictionary", by Eric Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6. The maintainers are committed to updating the on-line version of the Jargon File through and beyond paper publication, and will continue to make it available to archives and public-access sites as a trust of the hacker community.Here is a chronology of the high points in the recent on-line revisions:Version 2.1.1, Jun 12 1990: the Jargon File comes alive again after a seven-year hiatus. Reorganization and ma.s.sive additions were by Eric S. Raymond, approved by Guy Steele. Many items of UNIX, C, USENET, and microcomputer-based jargon were added at that time (as well as The Untimely Demise of Mabel The Monkey).Version 2.9.6, Aug 16 1991: corresponds to reproduction copy for book. This version had 18952 lines, 148629 words, 975551 characters, and 1702 entries.Version 2.9.8, Jan 01 1992: first public release since the book, including over fifty new entries and numerous corrections/additions to old ones. Packaged with version 1.1 of vh(1) hypertext reader. This version had 19509 lines, 153108 words, 1006023 characters, and 1760 entries.Version 2.9.9, Apr 01 1992: folded in XEROX PARC lexicon. This version had 20298 lines, 159651 words, 1048909 characters, and 1821 entries.Version 2.9.10, Jul 01 1992: lots of new historical material. This version had 21349 lines, 168330 words, 1106991 characters, and 1891 entries.Version numbering: Version numbers should be read as major.minor.revision. Major version 1 is reserved for the "old" (ITS) Jargon File, jargon-1. Major version 2 encompa.s.ses revisions by ESR (Eric S. Raymond) with a.s.sistance from GLS (Guy L. Steele, Jr.). Someday, the next maintainer will take over and sp.a.w.n "version 3". Usually later versions will either completely supersede or incorporate earlier versions, so there is generally no point in keeping old versions around.Our thanks to the coauthors of Steele-1983 for oversight and a.s.sistance, 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 [email protected]>, Bernie Cosell , Earl Boebert , and Joe Morris [email protected]>.We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished linguists. David Stampe and Charles Hoequist contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane [email protected]> helped us improve the p.r.o.nunciation guides.A few bits of this text quote previous works. We are indebted to Brian A. LaMacchia for obtaining permission for us to use material from the "TMRC Dictionary"; also, Don Libes contributed some appropriate material from his excellent book "Life With UNIX". We thank Per Lindberg , 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 p.r.o.nunciation guide he formerly maintained. And our grat.i.tude to Marc Weiser of XEROX PARC 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 to the final ma.n.u.script; he read and reread many drafts, checked facts, caught typos, submitted an amazing number of thoughtful comments, and did yeoman service in catching typos and minor usage bobbles. Mr. Brader"s rare combination of enthusiasm, persistence, wide-ranging technical knowledge, and precisionism in matters of language made his help invaluable, and the sustained volume and quality of his input over many months only allowed him to escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of margins.Finally, George V. Reilly [email protected]> helped with TeX arcana and painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions; Steve Summit contributed a number of excellent new entries and many small improvements to 2.9.10; and Eric Tiedemann contributed sage advice throughout on rhetoric, amphigory, and philosophunculism.:How Jargon Works: ******************:Jargon Construction: ======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 s.p.a.cEWAR hackers, and John McCarthy"s original crew of LISPers. These include the following::Verb Doubling: -- 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 {win}, {lose}, {hack}, {flame}, {barf}, {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 USENET culture has one *tripling* convention unrelated to this; the names of "joke" topic groups often have a tripled last element. The first and paradigmatic example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork (a "Muppet Show" reference); other cla.s.sics include 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, and alt.s.a.d.i.s.tic.dentists.drill.drill.drill.:Soundalike slang: --- Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered particularly {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 SlimeHowever, 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 HallThis is not really similar to the c.o.c.kney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the past, because c.o.c.kney subst.i.tutions are opaque whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent.:The "-P" convention: ------ 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 {T} and {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 {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]:Overgeneralization: ----- A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the frequency with which techspeak items such as names of program tools, command language primitives, and even a.s.sembler opcodes are applied to contexts outside of computing wherever hackers find amusing a.n.a.logies to them. Thus (to cite one of the best-known examples) UNIX hackers often {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, becauseporous => porosity generous => generosityhackers happily generalize:mysterious => mysteriosity ferrous => ferrosity obvious => obviosity dubious => dubiosityAlso, 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, note that 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 => disgust.i.tude hack => hackificationFurther, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary noted that the defined plural of "caboose" is "cabeese", and includes an entry which implies that the plural of "mouse" is {meeces}. On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in "x" may form plurals in "-xen" (see {VAXen} and {boxen} in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic /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 {frobnitz}) and "Unices" and "Twenices" (rather than "Unixes" and "Twenexes"; see {UNIX}, {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.:Spoken inarticulations: -- 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!":Anthromorphization: ----- Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. This isn"t done in a na"ive 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".Of the six listed constructions, verb doubling, peculiar noun formations, anthromorphization, and (especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite general; but punning jargon is still largely confined to MIT and other large universities, and the "-P" convention is found only where LISPers flourish.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 perfectionThe 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-platedNote, 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 {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.:Hacker Writing Style: =======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 "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 {vi} tutorial that looks like this:Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".Standard usage would make thisThen delete a line from the file by typing "dd."but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be p.r.o.ne 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 quirk 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 {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 {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 doc.u.ments 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 {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 *h.e.l.l*?" 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 t.i.tles; for example, "It is often alleged that Joe Haldeman wrote TheForeverWar as a reb.u.t.tal to Robert Heinlein"s earlier novel of the future military, StarshipTroopers."). Other forms exemplified by "=h.e.l.l=", "h.e.l.l/", or "/h.e.l.l/" 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*.There is also an accepted convention for "writing under erasure"; the textBe nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he"s in from corporate HQ.would be read as "Be nice to this fool, I mean this gentleman...". This comes from the fact that the digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a backs.p.a.ce. It parallels (and may have been influenced by) the ironic use of "slashouts" in science-fiction fanzines.In a formula, "*" signifies multiplication but two asterisks in a row are a shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN). Thus, one might write 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 {XOR} in C. Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of USENET. It is used consistently in this text.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 monos.p.a.ced 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 long.The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of "approximately"; that is, "~50" means "about fifty".On USENET and in the {MUD} world, common C boolean, logical, and relational operators such as "|", "&", "||", "&&", "!", "==", "!=", ">", and "=", and "=<>", 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:I resently 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.#ifdef FLAME Hasn"t anyone told those idiots that you can"t get decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today"s net speeds? #endif /* FLAME */I guess they figured the price premium for true frame-based semantic a.n.a.lysis 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 -- == 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 {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."Another habit is that of using angle-bracket enclosure to genericize a term; this derives from conventions used in {BNF}. Uses like the following are common:So this walks into a bar one day, and...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.One area where hackish 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 the notation of included text being indented by one ASCII TAB (0001001) character, which under UNIX and many other environments gives the appearance of an 8-s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ces 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.A few other idiosyncratic quoting styles survive because they are automatically generated. One particularly ugly one looks like this:/* Written hh:mm pm Mmm dd, yyyy by [email protected] in */ /* --- "Article subject, chopped to 35 ch" --- */ /* End of text from local:group */It is generated by an elderly, variant news-reading system called "notesfiles". The overall trend, however, is definitely away from such verbosity.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 s.p.a.ces are still alive; however, >-inclusion is now clearly the prevalent form in both netnews and mail.In 1991 practice is still evolving, and disputes over the "correct" inclusion style occasionally lead to {holy wars}. One variant style reported uses the citation character "|" in place of ">" for extended quotations where original variations in indentation are being retained. 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 doc.u.ments; the intended allusion is to the root prompt (the special UNIX command prompt issued when one is running as the privileged super-user).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. The good one is that it encourages honesty and tends to break down hierarchical authority relationships; the bad 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 pa.s.sed 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.:Hacker Speech Style: ======Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful word choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively little use of contractions or street slang. Dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 betweenif (going) {andif (!going) {that when they pa.r.s.e 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 j.a.panese) 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 mispa.r.s.ed as a negative tends to disturb them.Here"s a related quirk. 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!").:International Style: ======Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage in American English, we have made some effort to get input from abroad. Though the hacker-speak of other languages often uses translations of jargon from English (often as transmitted to them by earlier Jargon File versions!), the local variations are interesting, and knowledge of them may be of some use to travelling hackers.There are some references herein to "Commonwealth English". 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 {{Commonwealth Hackish}} reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary differences from U.S. hackish.Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia are reported to 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.A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they are parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to English-speakers.:How to Use the Lexicon: ************************:p.r.o.nunciation Guide: ======p.r.o.nunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all entries that are neither dictionary words p.r.o.nounced as in standard English nor obvious compounds thereof. Slashes bracket phonetic p.r.o.nunciations, which are to be interpreted using the following conventions:1. Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or back-accent follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks a secondary accent in some words of four or more syllables).2. Consonants are p.r.o.nounced as in American English. The letter "g" is always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); "ch" is soft ("church" rather than "chemist"). The letter "j" is the sound that occurs twice in "judge". The letter "s" is always as in "pa.s.s", never a z sound. The digraph "kh" is the guttural of "loch" or "l"chaim".3. Uppercase letters are p.r.o.nounced as their English letter names; thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aitch el el/. /Z/ may be p.r.o.nounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.4. Vowels are represented as follows:a back, that ar far, mark aw flaw, caught ay bake, rain e less, men ee easy, ski eir their, software i trip, hit i: life, sky o father, palm oh flow, sew oo loot, through or more, door ow out, how oy boy, coin uh but, some u put, foot y yet, young yoo few, chew [y]oo /oo/ with optional fronting as in "news" (/nooz/ or /nyooz/)A /*/ is used for the "schwa" sound of unstressed or occluded vowels (the one that is often written with an upside-down "e"). The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, "kitten" and "color" would be rendered /kit"n/ and /kuhl"r/, not /kit"*n/ and /kuhl"*r/.Entries with a p.r.o.nunciation of "//" are written-only usages. (No, UNIX weenies, this does *not* mean "p.r.o.nounce like previous p.r.o.nunciation"!):Other Lexicon Conventions: ==Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than the letter-by-letter order ignoring interword s.p.a.cing common in mainstream dictionaries), except that all entries beginning with nonalphabetic characters are sorted after Z. The case-blindness is a feature, not a bug.The beginning of each entry is marked by a colon (":") at the left margin. This convention helps out tools like hypertext browsers that benefit from knowing where entry boundaries are, but aren"t as context-sensitive as humans.In pure ASCII renderings of the Jargon File, you will see {} used to bracket words which themselves have entries in the File. This isn"t done all the time for every such word, but it is done everywhere that a reminder seems useful that the term has a jargon meaning and one might wish to refer to its entry.In this all-ASCII version, headwords for topic entries are distinguished from those for ordinary entries by being followed by "::" rather than ":"; similarly, references are surrounded by "{{" and "}}" rather than "{" and "}".Defining instances of terms and phrases appear in "slanted type". A defining instance is one which occurs near to or as part of an explanation of it.Prefix * 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 (n) of the manual, where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is games, and 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:abbrev. abbreviation adj. adjective adv. adverb alt. alternate cav. caveat esp. especially excl. exclamation imp. imperative interj. interjection n. noun obs. obsolete pl. plural poss. possibly pref. prefix prob. probably prov. proverbial quant. quantifier suff. suffix syn. synonym (or synonymous with) v. verb (may be transitive or intransitive) var. variant vi. intransitive verb vt. transitive verbWhere alternate spellings or p.r.o.nunciations 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:Berkeley University of California at Berkeley Cambridge the university in England (*not* the city in Ma.s.sachusetts where MIT happens to be located!) BBN Bolt, Beranek & Newman CMU Carnegie-Mellon University Commodore Commodore Business Machines DEC The Digital Equipment Corporation Fairchild The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto development group Fidonet See the {Fidonet} entry IBM International Business Machines MIT Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology; esp. the legendary MIT AI Lab culture of roughly 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups, including the Tech Model Railroad Club NRL Naval Research Laboratories NYU New York University OED The Oxford English Dictionary Purdue Purdue University SAIL Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (at Stanford University) SI From Syst"eme International, the name for the standard conventions of metric nomenclature used in the sciences Stanford Stanford University Sun Sun Microsystems TMRC Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at MIT c. 1960. Material marked TMRC is from "An Abridged Dictionary of the TMRC Language", originally compiled by Pete Samson in 1959 UCLA University of California at Los Angeles UK the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) USENET See the {USENET} entry WPI Worcester Polytechnic Inst.i.tute, site of a very active community of PDP-10 hackers during the 1970s XEROX PARC XEROX"s Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering research in user interface design and networking Yale Yale UniversitySome other etymology abbreviations such as {UNIX} and {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.:Format For New Entries: =========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 --- head-words separated from text by a colon (double colon for topic entries), cross-references in curly brackets (doubled for topic entries), p.r.o.nunciations in slashes, etymologies in square brackets, single-s.p.a.ce after definition numbers and word cla.s.ses, 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 doc.u.ment 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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.The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and re-posted from now on and will include a version number. Read it, pa.s.s it around, contribute --- this is *your* monument!The Jargon Lexicon ******************= A = =====:abbrev: /*-breev"/, /*-brev"/ n. Common abbreviation for "abbreviation".:ABEND: [ABnormal END] /ah"bend/, /*-bend"/ n. Abnormal termination (of software); {crash}; {lossage}. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by {code grinder}s. Usually capitalized, but may appear as "abend". Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called "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".:acc.u.mulator: n. 1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for "register" is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a wh