Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person communicate with considerable fluency over the net, perhaps precisely because they can forget on an unconscious level that they are dealing with people and thus don’t feel stressed and anxious as they would face to face.
Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters for poor spelling or grammar, the network places a premium on literacy and clarity of expression. It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal letters as art.
2.2.3. International Style
Though the hacker-speak of other languages often uses translations of jargon from English, the local variations are interesting, and knowledge of them may be of some use to travelling hackers.
There are some variations in hacker usage as reported in the English spoken in Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, India, etc. -- though Canada is heavily influenced by American usage). Commonwealth hackers are more likely to pronounce transactions like «char» and «soc», etc., as spelled /char/, /sok/, as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names (especially two-component names tend to be pronounced more often.
E.g.: soc.wibble is /sok dot wib’l/ rather than /sohsh wib’l/.
The prefix meta may be pronounced /mee’t*/; similarly, Greek letter is usually /bee’t*/, zeta is usually /zee’t*/, and so forth. Preferred metasyntactic variables include ‘eek’, ‘ook’, ‘frodo’, and ‘bilbo’; ‘wibble’, ‘wobble’, and in emergencies ‘wubble’, ‘flob’, etc.
Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes ‘-o-rama’, ‘frenzy’, and ‘city’.
E.g.: «hack-o-rama!», «core dump frenzy!», «barf city!’
Finally, the American terms for «parenthesis», «brackets», and «braces» for (), [], and {} are uncommon. Commonwealth hackish prefers «brackets», «square brackets», and «curly brackets».
Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report that they often use a mixture of English and their native languages for technical conversation. Occasionally they develop idioms in their English usage that are influenced by their native-language styles. Some of these are reported here.
2.2.6.Hacker Humour
A distinctive style of shared intellectual humor found among hackers has the following marked characteristics:
1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor having to do with confusion of. A metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language.
Metasyntactic variable is a name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time.
To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures:
foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux .:
Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for example.
2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs, such as standards documents, language descriptions (see Îøèáêà! Çàêëàäêà íå îïðåäåëåíà.), and even entire scientific theories, for instance, Îøèáêà! Çàêëàäêà íå îïðåäåëåíà., Îøèáêà! Çàêëàäêà íå îïðåäåëåíà.).
3. Fascination with puns and wordplay.
2.3. Pronunciation Features
Pronunciation keys provided in the Glossary of Terms are not dictionary words pronounced as in standard. Slashes bracket phonetic pronunciations, which are to be interpreted using the following conventions:
1. Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or back-accent follows accented syllable (the back-accent marks a secondary accent in some words of four or more syllables). If no accent is given, the word is pronounced with equal accentuation on all syllables (this is common for abbreviations).
1. Consonants are pronounced as in standard English:
· `g' is always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant");
· terminal `r’ (as in «hard» or «more») may be pronounced or not depending on the local dialect
· `j' is the sound that occurs twice in "judge";
· `s' is always as in "pass", never a z sound;
· the diagraph `ch' is soft (as in "church" rather than "chemist");
· the digraph `kh' is the guttural of "loch" or "l'chaim";
· the digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of "bughouse" or "ragheap" (this case is rare in English).
2. Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names; E.g.: /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/.
/Z/ may be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on the local dialect.
4. Vowels are represented as follows:
/a/
back, that
/ah/
father, palm
/ar/ or /a:/
far, mark
/aw/
flaw, caught
/ay/
bake, rain
/e/
less, men
/ee/
easy, ski
/eir/ or /ea/
their, software
/i/
trip, hit
/ai/
life, sky
/o/
block, stock (see note)
/oh/
flow, sew
/oo/
loot, through
/or/ or /o:/
more, door
/ow/
out, how
/oy/
boy, coin
/uh/
but, some
/u/
put, foot
/y/
yet, young
/yoo/
few, chew
The glyph /*/ is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded vowels (the one that is often written with an upside-down `e'). The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, `kitten' and `color' would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not /kit'*n/ and /kuhl'*r/.
The above table reflects mainly distinctions found in Standard English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken by TV network announcers and typical of educated speech). Speakers of British Received Pronunciation can smash terminal /r/ and all unstressed vowels. Speakers of many varieties of southern American will automatically change /o/ to /aw/ or /ah/, etc. Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages.
Conclusions
Computerization, hacker culture, and hacker jargon are viewed here as a source of lexical, semantic-stylistic, and phonetic changes it introduces into Modern English.
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