please ignore this post

Ermmm... 60,000,000. The number of non-perambulated citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is negligible. I was certainly in a pram as a child and pretty certain that every other regular British contributor to this board was as well.

Do u like art? As in making ur own art, or looking at other ppls?

super Penguin
Super Bookworm



USA
319 Posts
Posted - 15/06/2005 : 20:17:20
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

yeh i like painting and drawing


mandybutter
Bookworm



USA
84 Posts
Posted - 16/06/2005 : 04:59:58
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

yes, but not freehand drawing- I like photography and design and sculpture and making jewelry and paper mache and...lots of other stuff.


FORMANDO
Bookworm



United Kingdom
88 Posts
Posted - 16/06/2005 : 06:23:45
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

me i made some art its on the win things padge under show winners from other compaoins


The Editor
Administrator



United Kingdom
68 Posts
Posted - 16/06/2005 : 09:47:32
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We really liked your drawing Formando - I hope you'll enter again this month for the chance to win...


Splat
Senior Super Bookworm



United Kingdom
526 Posts
Posted - 16/06/2005 : 15:41:01
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I luv making and looking at art. I like painting drawing - everything really. And I luv looking at meaningful art - art with layers of meaning. I like looking at art with lots of detail as well, like a large landscape showing loads of animals and people doing their normal thing. And I like seascapes.


super Penguin
Super Bookworm



USA
319 Posts
Posted - 18/06/2005 : 21:15:59
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i like drawing people its fun


Splat
Senior Super Bookworm



United Kingdom
526 Posts
Posted - 20/06/2005 : 20:23:18
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

yeh - I like drawin made-up ppl. Especially faces. There r so many different ppl u can create, wiv little details 2 create personality.


super Penguin
Super Bookworm



USA
319 Posts
Posted - 24/06/2005 : 21:59:50
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

yeh theres no guidelines to drawing fantsy


Splat
Senior Super Bookworm



United Kingdom
526 Posts
Posted - 27/06/2005 : 19:49:14
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

yep, and fantasy landscapes r fun 2 - as in, magical ones.


Cheesy_wotsit
Brand New Bookworm



United Kingdom
7 Posts
Posted - 28/06/2005 : 19:29:49
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I love art! making it and looking at it, although I am not that good.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edited by - Cheesy_wotsit on 29/06/2005 10:58:53


Splat
Senior Super Bookworm



United Kingdom
526 Posts
Posted - 29/06/2005 : 15:37:04
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

u don't hav 2 b gud @ art 2 appreci8 it, tho sum ppl think so. Same wiv writin and postry.


Spanna
Junior Bookworm



United Kingdom
21 Posts
Posted - 04/07/2005 : 20:55:53
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I like art, I try and draw things but they never turn as good as I plan, I guess you can be good at everything! I sometimes make little bluetac families, I try to make them really detailed and when I get it perfect, I accidently squash them! But can you call little blue tac people art. I'm strange! lol


Splat
Senior Super Bookworm



United Kingdom
526 Posts
Posted - 06/07/2005 : 15:27:28
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

lol!
Yeh - everythin comes out so much better in ur mind wen u plan + imagin it, than wen u actually cre8 the art...


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Snitz Forums 2000

Old Nick

#======= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.4.7, 29 DEC 2003 =======#

The Jargon File

(version 4.4.7)
________________________________________________________________

Table of Contents

Welcome to the Jargon File
I. Introduction

1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture
2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak
3. Revision History
4. Jargon Construction

Verb Doubling
Soundalike Slang
The -P Convention
Overgeneralization
Spoken inarticulations
Anthropomorphization
Comparatives

5. Hacker Writing Style
6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions
7. Hacker Speech Style
8. International Style
9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
10. Pronunciation Guide
11. Other Lexicon Conventions
12. Format for New Entries

II. The Jargon Lexicon

Glossary

III. Appendices

A. Hacker Folklore

The Meaning of `Hack'
TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity
A Story About `Magic'
Some AI Koans

Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
Moon instructs a student
Sussman attains enlightenment
Drescher and the toaster

OS and JEDGAR
The Story of Mel

B. A Portrait of J. Random Hacker

General Appearance
Dress
Reading Habits
Other Interests
Physical Activity and Sports
Education
Things Hackers Detest and Avoid
Food
Politics
Gender and Ethnicity
Religion
Ceremonial Chemicals
Communication Style
Geographical Distribution
Sexual Habits
Personality Characteristics
Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality
Miscellaneous

C. Helping Hacker Culture Grow
Bibliography

Welcome to the Jargon File

This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang
illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

This document (the Jargon File) is in the public domain, to be freely
used, shared, and modified. There are (by intention) no legal
restraints on what you can do with it, but there are traditions about
its proper use to which many hackers are quite strongly attached.
Please extend the courtesy of proper citation when you quote the
File, ideally with a version number, as it will change and grow over
time. (Examples of appropriate citation form: "Jargon File 4.4.7" or
"The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003".)

The Jargon File is a common heritage of the hacker culture. Over the
years a number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to
maintaining the File and been recognized by the net at large as
editors of it. Editorial responsibilities include: to collate
contributions and suggestions from others; to seek out corroborating
information; to cross-reference related entries; to keep the file in
a consistent format; and to announce and distribute updated versions
periodically. Current volunteer editors include:

Eric Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>

Although there is no requirement that you do so, it is considered
good form to check with an editor before quoting the File in a
published work or commercial product. We may have additional
information that would be helpful to you and can assist you in
framing your quote to reflect not only the letter of the File but its
spirit as well.

All contributions and suggestions about this file sent to a volunteer
editor are gratefully received and will be regarded, unless otherwise
labelled, as freely given donations for possible use as part of this
public-domain file.

From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished, edited,
and formatted for commercial publication with the cooperation of the
volunteer editors and the hacker community at large. If you wish to
have a bound paper copy of this file, you may find it convenient to
purchase one of these. They often contain additional material not
found in on-line versions. The three `authorized' editions so far are
described in the Revision History section; there may be more in the
future.

The Jargon File's online rendition uses an unusually large number of
special characters. This test page lists them so you can check what
your browser does with each one.
glyph description
a greek character alpha
k greek character kappa
l greek character lambda
L greek character Lambda
n greek character nu
o greek character omicron
p greek character pi
£ pound sterling
left angle bracket
right angle bracket
æ ae ligature
ß German sharp-s sign
?1 similarity sign
(+) circle-plus
(×) circle-times
× times
{} empty set (used for APL null)
µ micro quantifier sign
-> right arrow
<=> horizontal double arrow
(TM) trademark symbol
® registered-trademark symbol
- minus
± plus-or-minus
Ø slashed-O
@ schwa
´ acute accent
· medial dot

We normally test with the latest build of Mozilla. If some of the
special characters above look wrong, your browser has bugs in its
standards-conformance and you should replace it.

Introduction

Table of Contents

1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture
2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak
3. Revision History
4. Jargon Construction

Verb Doubling
Soundalike Slang
The -P Convention
Overgeneralization
Spoken inarticulations
Anthropomorphization
Comparatives

5. Hacker Writing Style
6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions
7. Hacker Speech Style
8. International Style
9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
10. Pronunciation Guide
11. Other Lexicon Conventions
12. Format for New Entries

Chapter 1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture

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 50 years old.

As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold
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
surreal 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 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 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.

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, in the early 1990s it
became 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 since the early 1970s. 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. The `outside' reader's attention is particularly
directed to the Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B. The
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.

Chapter 2. 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 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:

slang
informal language from mainstream English or non-technical
subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc).

jargon
without qualifier, denotes informal `slangy' language peculiar
to or predominantly found among hackers -- the subject of this
lexicon.

techspeak
the formal technical vocabulary of programming, computer
science, 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 communicate
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
kluge, cruft, and foo. We believe specialist lexicographers will find
many of the historical notes more than casually instructive.

Chapter 3. 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 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 (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, FTPed 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 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 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 Some 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 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@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 Eric.

(Warning: other email addresses and URLs 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. If a web reference goes
stale, try a Google or Alta Vista search for relevant phrases.

Please try to review a recent copy of the on-line document before
submitting entries; it is available on the Web. It will often contain
new material not recorded in the latest paper snapshot that could
save you some typing. It also includes some submission guidelines not
reproduced here.

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 3.0.0 version was published in August 1993 as the second edition
of The New Hacker's Dictionary, again from MIT Press (ISBN
0-262-18154-1).

The 4.0.0 version was published in September 1996 as the third
edition of The New Hacker's Dictionary from MIT Press (ISBN
0-262-68092-0).

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 major revisions:
Version Date Lines Words Characters Entries Comments
2.1.1 Jun 12 1990 5485 42842 278958 790

The Jargon File comes alive again after a seven-year hiatus.
Reorganization and massive 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.
2.1.5 Nov 28 1990 6028 46946 307510 866

Changes and additions by ESR in response to numerous USENET
submissions and comment from the First Edition co-authors. The
Bibliography (Appendix C) was also appended.
2.2.1 Dec 15 1990 9394 75954 490501 1046

Most of the contents of the 1983 paper edition edited by Guy Steele
was merged in. Many more USENET submissions added, including the
International Style and the material on Commonwealth Hackish.
2.3.1 Jan 03 1991 10728 85070 558261 1138

The great format change -- case is no longer smashed in lexicon keys
and cross-references. A very few entries from jargon-1 which were
basically straight techspeak were deleted; this enabled the rest of
Appendix B (created in 2.1.1) to be merged back into main text and
the appendix replaced with the Portrait of J. Random Hacker. More
USENET submissions were added.
2.4.1 Jan 14 1991 12362 97819 642899 1239

The Story of Mel and many more USENET submissions merged in. More
material on hackish writing habits added. Numerous typo fixes.
2.6.1 Feb 12 1991 15011 118277 774942 1484

Second great format change; no more <> around headwords or
references. Merged in results of serious copy-editing passes by Guy
Steele, Mark Brader. Still more entries added.
2.7.1 Mar 01 1991 16087 126885 831872 1533

New section on slang/jargon/techspeak added. Results of Guy's second
edit pass merged in.
2.8.1 Mar 22 1991 17154 135647 888333 1602

Material from the TMRC Dictionary and MRC's editing pass merged in.
2.9.6 Aug 16 1991 18952 148629 975551 1702

Corresponds to reproduction copy for book.
2.9.8 Jan 01 1992 19509 153108 1006023 1760

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.
2.9.9 Apr 01 1992 20298 159651 1048909 1821

Folded in XEROX PARC lexicon.
2.9.10 Jul 01 1992 21349 168330 1106991 1891

lots of new historical material.
2.9.11 Jan 01 1993 21725 171169 1125880 1922

Lots of new historical material.
2.9.12 May 10 1993 22238 175114 1152467 1946

A few new entries & changes, marginal MUD/IRC slang and some
borderline techspeak removed, all in preparation for 2nd Edition of
TNHD.
3.0.0 Jul 27 1993 22548 177520 1169372 1961

Manuscript freeze for 2nd edition of TNHD.
3.1.0 Oct 15 1994 23197 181001 1193818 1990

Interim release to test WWW conversion.
3.2.0 Mar 15 1995 23822 185961 1226358 2031

Spring 1995 update.
3.3.0 Jan 20 1996 24055 187957 1239604 2045

Winter 1996 update.
3.3.1 Jan 25 1996 24147 188728 1244554 2050

Copy-corrected improvement on 3.3.0 shipped to MIT Press as a step
towards TNHD III.
4.0.0 Jul 25 1996 24801 193697 1281402 2067

The actual TNHD III version after copy-edit
4.1.0 8 Apr 1999 25777 206825 1359992 2217

The Jargon File rides again after three years.
4.2.0 31 Jan 2000 26598 214639 1412243 2267

Fix processing of URLs.
4.3.0 30 Apr 2001 27805 224978 1480215 2319

Special edition in honor of the first implementation of RFC 1149.
Also cleaned up a number of obsolete entries.
4.4.0 10 May 2003 32004 230012 1707139 2290

XML-Docbook format conversion. Serious pruning of old slang, nearly
100 entries failed the Google test and were removed.
4.4.1 13 May 2003 37157 234687 1618716 2290

XML-Docbook format fixes.
4.4.2 22 May 2003 32629 227852 1555125 2290

Fix filename collisions and other small problems.
4.4.3 15 Jul 2003 37363 235135 1629667 2293

Fix some stylesheet problems leading to missing links.
4.4.4 14 Aug 2003 37392 235271 1630579 2295

Corrected build machinery; we can make RPMS now.
4.4.5 4 Oct 2003 37482 235858 1634767 2299

Minor updates. Four new entries and a better original-bug picture.
4.4.6 25 Oct 2003 37560 236406 1638454 2302

Added glider illustration. Amended FUD entry pursuent to SCO's
attempt to abuse it.
4.4.7 29 Dec 2003 37666 237206 1643609 2307

Winter 2003 update.

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 encompasses revisions by ESR
(Eric S. Raymond) with assistance from GLS (Guy L. Steele, Jr.)
leading up to and including the second paper edition. From now on,
major version number N.00 will probably correspond to the Nth paper
edition. 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
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 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 a decade 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.

Chapter 4. Jargon Construction

Table of Contents

Verb Doubling
Soundalike Slang
The -P Convention
Overgeneralization
Spoken inarticulations
Anthropomorphization
Comparatives

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.

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 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

These two traditions fuse in the newsgroup
alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb, devoted to humor based on
deliberately confounding parts of speech. Several observers have
noted that the contents of this group is excellently representative
of the peculiarities of hacker humor.

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 Slime
* Wall Street Journal -> Wall Street Urinal

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
* Microsoft -> Microsloth
* Internet Explorer -> Internet Exploiter
* FrontPage -> AffrontPage
* VB.NET -> VB Nyet
* Lotus Notes -> Lotus Bloats
* Microsoft Outlook -> Microsoft Outhouse
* Linux -> Linsux
* FreeBSD -> FreeLSD
* C# -> C Flat

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.

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?"

[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 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 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 and 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.

The suffix "-full" can also be applied in generalized and fanciful
ways, as in "As soon as you have more than one cachefull of data, the
system starts thrashing," or "As soon as I have more than one
headfull of ideas, I start writing it all down." A common use is
"screenfull", meaning the amount of text that will fit on one screen,
usually in text mode where you have no choice as to character size.
Another common form is "bufferfull".

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 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 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 the
Hebrew-style `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 `Twenexen' was never used,
and `Unixen' was seldom sighted in the wild until the year 2000,
thirty years after it might logically have come into use; it has been
suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular
endings that attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is
reported that `comma' and `semicolon' pluralize as `commata' and
`semicola' respectively. 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, MUDs,
and IRC channels (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!"

Anthropomorphization

Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish
tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists
and academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for
anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of
behavior to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most
hackers anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program
behavior in terms of wants and desires.

Thus it is common 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". Or: "You can't run those two cards on the
same bus; they fight over interrupt 9."

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'.

At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs
actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the
people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they
would use language that seems to ascribe consciousness to them. The
mind-set behind this tendency thus demands examination.

The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it 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'. To t

So there's a limit on post length and number of emoticons.

Yes, more reasons to ignore this post - especially long winded ones.

Long-winded is right. Sure glad I ignored it!!!

quote:

Originally posted by Dave Tong:
#======= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.4.7, 29 DEC 2003 =======#

The Jargon File

(version 4.4.7)
________________________________________________________________

Table of Contents

Welcome to the Jargon File
I. Introduction

1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture
2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak
3. Revision History
4. Jargon Construction

Verb Doubling
Soundalike Slang
The -P Convention
Overgeneralization
Spoken inarticulations
Anthropomorphization
Comparatives

5. Hacker Writing Style
6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions
7. Hacker Speech Style
8. International Style
9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
10. Pronunciation Guide
11. Other Lexicon Conventions
12. Format for New Entries

II. The Jargon Lexicon

Glossary

III. Appendices

A. Hacker Folklore

The Meaning of `Hack'
TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity
A Story About `Magic'
Some AI Koans

Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
Moon instructs a student
Sussman attains enlightenment
Drescher and the toaster

OS and JEDGAR
The Story of Mel

B. A Portrait of J. Random Hacker

General Appearance
Dress
Reading Habits
Other Interests
Physical Activity and Sports
Education
Things Hackers Detest and Avoid
Food
Politics
Gender and Ethnicity
Religion
Ceremonial Chemicals
Communication Style
Geographical Distribution
Sexual Habits
Personality Characteristics
Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality
Miscellaneous

C. Helping Hacker Culture Grow
Bibliography

Welcome to the Jargon File

This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang
illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

This document (the Jargon File) is in the public domain, to be freely
used, shared, and modified. There are (by intention) no legal
restraints on what you can do with it, but there are traditions about
its proper use to which many hackers are quite strongly attached.
Please extend the courtesy of proper citation when you quote the
File, ideally with a version number, as it will change and grow over
time. (Examples of appropriate citation form: "Jargon File 4.4.7" or
"The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003".)

The Jargon File is a common heritage of the hacker culture. Over the
years a number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to
maintaining the File and been recognized by the net at large as
editors of it. Editorial responsibilities include: to collate
contributions and suggestions from others; to seek out corroborating
information; to cross-reference related entries; to keep the file in
a consistent format; and to announce and distribute updated versions
periodically. Current volunteer editors include:

Eric Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>

Although there is no requirement that you do so, it is considered
good form to check with an editor before quoting the File in a
published work or commercial product. We may have additional
information that would be helpful to you and can assist you in
framing your quote to reflect not only the letter of the File but its
spirit as well.

All contributions and suggestions about this file sent to a volunteer
editor are gratefully received and will be regarded, unless otherwise
labelled, as freely given donations for possible use as part of this
public-domain file.

From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished, edited,
and formatted for commercial publication with the cooperation of the
volunteer editors and the hacker community at large. If you wish to
have a bound paper copy of this file, you may find it convenient to
purchase one of these. They often contain additional material not
found in on-line versions. The three `authorized' editions so far are
described in the Revision History section; there may be more in the
future.

The Jargon File's online rendition uses an unusually large number of
special characters. This test page lists them so you can check what
your browser does with each one.
glyph description
a greek character alpha
k greek character kappa
l greek character lambda
L greek character Lambda
n greek character nu
o greek character omicron
p greek character pi
£ pound sterling
left angle bracket
right angle bracket
æ ae ligature
ß German sharp-s sign
?1 similarity sign
(+) circle-plus
(×) circle-times
× times
{} empty set (used for APL null)
µ micro quantifier sign
-> right arrow
<=> horizontal double arrow
(TM) trademark symbol
® registered-trademark symbol
- minus
± plus-or-minus
Ø slashed-O
@ schwa
´ acute accent
· medial dot

We normally test with the latest build of Mozilla. If some of the
special characters above look wrong, your browser has bugs in its
standards-conformance and you should replace it.

Introduction

Table of Contents

1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture
2. Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak
3. Revision History
4. Jargon Construction

Verb Doubling
Soundalike Slang
The -P Convention
Overgeneralization
Spoken inarticulations
Anthropomorphization
Comparatives

5. Hacker Writing Style
6. Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions
7. Hacker Speech Style
8. International Style
9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
10. Pronunciation Guide
11. Other Lexicon Conventions
12. Format for New Entries

Chapter 1. Hacker Slang and Hacker Culture

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 50 years old.

As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold
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
surreal 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 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 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.

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, in the early 1990s it
became 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 since the early 1970s. 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. The `outside' reader's attention is particularly
directed to the Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B. The
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.

Chapter 2. 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 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:

slang
informal language from mainstream English or non-technical
subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc).

jargon
without qualifier, denotes informal `slangy' language peculiar
to or predominantly found among hackers -- the subject of this
lexicon.

techspeak
the formal technical vocabulary of programming, computer
science, 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 communicate
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
kluge, cruft, and foo. We believe specialist lexicographers will find
many of the historical notes more than casually instructive.

Chapter 3. 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 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 (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, FTPed 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 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 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 Some 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 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@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 Eric.

(Warning: other email addresses and URLs 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. If a web reference goes
stale, try a Google or Alta Vista search for relevant phrases.

Please try to review a recent copy of the on-line document before
submitting entries; it is available on the Web. It will often contain
new material not recorded in the latest paper snapshot that could
save you some typing. It also includes some submission guidelines not
reproduced here.

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 3.0.0 version was published in August 1993 as the second edition
of The New Hacker's Dictionary, again from MIT Press (ISBN
0-262-18154-1).

The 4.0.0 version was published in September 1996 as the third
edition of The New Hacker's Dictionary from MIT Press (ISBN
0-262-68092-0).

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 major revisions:
Version Date Lines Words Characters Entries Comments
2.1.1 Jun 12 1990 5485 42842 278958 790

The Jargon File comes alive again after a seven-year hiatus.
Reorganization and massive 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.
2.1.5 Nov 28 1990 6028 46946 307510 866

Changes and additions by ESR in response to numerous USENET
submissions and comment from the First Edition co-authors. The
Bibliography (Appendix C) was also appended.
2.2.1 Dec 15 1990 9394 75954 490501 1046

Most of the contents of the 1983 paper edition edited by Guy Steele
was merged in. Many more USENET submissions added, including the
International Style and the material on Commonwealth Hackish.
2.3.1 Jan 03 1991 10728 85070 558261 1138

The great format change -- case is no longer smashed in lexicon keys
and cross-references. A very few entries from jargon-1 which were
basically straight techspeak were deleted; this enabled the rest of
Appendix B (created in 2.1.1) to be merged back into main text and
the appendix replaced with the Portrait of J. Random Hacker. More
USENET submissions were added.
2.4.1 Jan 14 1991 12362 97819 642899 1239

The Story of Mel and many more USENET submissions merged in. More
material on hackish writing habits added. Numerous typo fixes.
2.6.1 Feb 12 1991 15011 118277 774942 1484

Second great format change; no more <> around headwords or
references. Merged in results of serious copy-editing passes by Guy
Steele, Mark Brader. Still more entries added.
2.7.1 Mar 01 1991 16087 126885 831872 1533

New section on slang/jargon/techspeak added. Results of Guy's second
edit pass merged in.
2.8.1 Mar 22 1991 17154 135647 888333 1602

Material from the TMRC Dictionary and MRC's editing pass merged in.
2.9.6 Aug 16 1991 18952 148629 975551 1702

Corresponds to reproduction copy for book.
2.9.8 Jan 01 1992 19509 153108 1006023 1760

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.
2.9.9 Apr 01 1992 20298 159651 1048909 1821

Folded in XEROX PARC lexicon.
2.9.10 Jul 01 1992 21349 168330 1106991 1891

lots of new historical material.
2.9.11 Jan 01 1993 21725 171169 1125880 1922

Lots of new historical material.
2.9.12 May 10 1993 22238 175114 1152467 1946

A few new entries & changes, marginal MUD/IRC slang and some
borderline techspeak removed, all in preparation for 2nd Edition of
TNHD.
3.0.0 Jul 27 1993 22548 177520 1169372 1961

Manuscript freeze for 2nd edition of TNHD.
3.1.0 Oct 15 1994 23197 181001 1193818 1990

Interim release to test WWW conversion.
3.2.0 Mar 15 1995 23822 185961 1226358 2031

Spring 1995 update.
3.3.0 Jan 20 1996 24055 187957 1239604 2045

Winter 1996 update.
3.3.1 Jan 25 1996 24147 188728 1244554 2050

Copy-corrected improvement on 3.3.0 shipped to MIT Press as a step
towards TNHD III.
4.0.0 Jul 25 1996 24801 193697 1281402 2067

The actual TNHD III version after copy-edit
4.1.0 8 Apr 1999 25777 206825 1359992 2217

The Jargon File rides again after three years.
4.2.0 31 Jan 2000 26598 214639 1412243 2267

Fix processing of URLs.
4.3.0 30 Apr 2001 27805 224978 1480215 2319

Special edition in honor of the first implementation of RFC 1149.
Also cleaned up a number of obsolete entries.
4.4.0 10 May 2003 32004 230012 1707139 2290

XML-Docbook format conversion. Serious pruning of old slang, nearly
100 entries failed the Google test and were removed.
4.4.1 13 May 2003 37157 234687 1618716 2290

XML-Docbook format fixes.
4.4.2 22 May 2003 32629 227852 1555125 2290

Fix filename collisions and other small problems.
4.4.3 15 Jul 2003 37363 235135 1629667 2293

Fix some stylesheet problems leading to missing links.
4.4.4 14 Aug 2003 37392 235271 1630579 2295

Corrected build machinery; we can make RPMS now.
4.4.5 4 Oct 2003 37482 235858 1634767 2299

Minor updates. Four new entries and a better original-bug picture.
4.4.6 25 Oct 2003 37560 236406 1638454 2302

Added glider illustration. Amended FUD entry pursuent to SCO's
attempt to abuse it.
4.4.7 29 Dec 2003 37666 237206 1643609 2307

Winter 2003 update.

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 encompasses revisions by ESR
(Eric S. Raymond) with assistance from GLS (Guy L. Steele, Jr.)
leading up to and including the second paper edition. From now on,
major version number N.00 will probably correspond to the Nth paper
edition. 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
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 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 a decade 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.

Chapter 4. Jargon Construction

Table of Contents

Verb Doubling
Soundalike Slang
The -P Convention
Overgeneralization
Spoken inarticulations
Anthropomorphization
Comparatives

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.

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 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

These two traditions fuse in the newsgroup
alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb, devoted to humor based on
deliberately confounding parts of speech. Several observers have
noted that the contents of this group is excellently representative
of the peculiarities of hacker humor.

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 Slime
* Wall Street Journal -> Wall Street Urinal

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
* Microsoft -> Microsloth
* Internet Explorer -> Internet Exploiter
* FrontPage -> AffrontPage
* VB.NET -> VB Nyet
* Lotus Notes -> Lotus Bloats
* Microsoft Outlook -> Microsoft Outhouse
* Linux -> Linsux
* FreeBSD -> FreeLSD
* C# -> C Flat

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.

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?"

[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 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 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 and 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.

The suffix "-full" can also be applied in generalized and fanciful
ways, as in "As soon as you have more than one cachefull of data, the
system starts thrashing," or "As soon as I have more than one
headfull of ideas, I start writing it all down." A common use is
"screenfull", meaning the amount of text that will fit on one screen,
usually in text mode where you have no choice as to character size.
Another common form is "bufferfull".

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 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 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 the
Hebrew-style `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 `Twenexen' was never used,
and `Unixen' was seldom sighted in the wild until the year 2000,
thirty years after it might logically have come into use; it has been
suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular
endings that attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is
reported that `comma' and `semicolon' pluralize as `commata' and
`semicola' respectively. 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, MUDs,
and IRC channels (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!"

Anthropomorphization

Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish
tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists
and academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for
anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of
behavior to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most
hackers anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program
behavior in terms of wants and desires.

Thus it is common 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". Or: "You can't run those two cards on the
same bus; they fight over interrupt 9."

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'.

At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs
actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the
people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they
would use language that seems to ascribe consciousness to them. The
mind-set behind this tendency thus demands examination.

The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in
a naive way; hackers don't personalize t

Interesting - the post length limit applies to quoted posts also

I'm ignoring this as there is nothing to see here.

zzzzzz

Jason

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Must be a REALLY SLOW DAY in the office...

First, this thread drives MassMess completely insane and now Eric White.

Too bad, he seemed like a pretty normal guy for a while.

:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

What the hell has happened

quote:

Originally posted by KillerB:
What the hell has happened

I believe the problem might be too much ignoring drives these people insane. They can't handle being away for so long and then one day BANG! They snap.

Jason

BOO!

I hope this page ends soon - it's getting on my nerves.

From hence the chicken came as night cooks eggs into yolkless gummy tarts.

Just helping KillerB end this Page

Thanks V Miko - all help is appreciated

quote:

Originally posted by mike1026:
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

So what seems to be upsetting you? Are you feeling ignored?

Please don't do that again - nice narrow posts next page, please.

Bored now

it is mine all mine

This make me a four timer.

Well taken. I would have made an effort but my browser has been acting up. Hence, the length of time it's taken me to respond

It is a pretty amazing accomplishment that I was able to ignore the whole 35th page and still get a NPP.

I have an image of you, sitting in Oklahoma City, with your Howard Keel albums and a glass of Kistler, with several pages open. One constantly being refreshed on the Tasting Notes page and another with the reply page open with "it is mine all mine" ready for three days. Then suddenly striking as the 49th parallel post arrives.

Fair play for your perseverance.

I could have taken it easily. But there is no honour in that. Bushido!

After the last few pages can we please not get so trippy on playing with the formatting? I almost forgot to take my drugs because I thought I was tripping.

quote:

Originally posted by Pauly:
After the last few pages can we please not get so trippy on playing with the formatting? I almost forgot to take my drugs because I thought I was tripping.

EW was definitely tripping

who, moi?

Just ignore me as I am ignoring this post. Just checking out what the stop lights might look like.

Whoa. Trippy.

I begin to feel like I were a rooky, here...

You nasty bunch,
You nasty,
You trashy
You classless bunch,
You sleazy,
You freaky



50: Rothko
100: Vista
150: CHICO
200: MassMess
250: Nobody
300: Stemor
350: KillerB
400: Andreadago
450: New Dutch Drinker
500: Phylloxera
550: RedRedVine
600: Whiner15
650: MassMess
700: Andreadago
750: KillerB
800: Rothko
850: Pauly
900: Vinaigre
950: NewDutchDinker
1,000: leesunhee, aka The Creator

1,050: Seaquam
1,100: MassMess
1,150: New DutchDrinker
1,200: Eric White
1,250: Whiner15
1,300: seanr7
1,350: Seaquam
1,400: KillerB
1,450: seanr7
1,500: Seaquam
1,550: MassMess
1,600: Green Drazi*
1,650: seanr7#
1,700: GreenDrazi
1,750: Eric White^
1,800: GreenDrazi^
1,850: seanr7 with his Howard Keel collection

* Dave Tong done a dispicable thing. I think he needs a special category for dispicability.

# GreenDrazi did a Dave Tong but immediately admitted to it.

^ RWSW eliminated by Order of the Creator for excessive row-posting and then disemperambulating his toys.

Mmmm, this has turned interesting since my last visit. I wonder how much longer the server can cope with your creativity guyz...