Лексичні та синтактико-стилістичні зміни в сучасній англійській мові: вплив комп’ютерних технологій

Finally, it is worth mentioning that many studies of on-line communication have shown that electronic links have a de-inhibiting effect on people. Deprived of the body-language cues through which emotional state is expressed, people tend to forget everything about other parties except what is presented over that ASCII link. This has both good and bad effects. A good one is that it encourages honesty and tends to break down hierarchical authority relationships; a bad one is that it may encourage depersonalization and gratuitous rudeness. Perhaps in response to this, experienced netters often display a sort of conscious formal politesse in their writing that has passed out of fashion in other spoken and written media (for example, the phrase «Well said, sir!» is not uncommon).

Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person communicate with considerable fluency over the net, perhaps precisely because they can forget on an unconscious level that they are dealing with people and thus don’t feel stressed and anxious as they would face to face.

Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters for poor spelling or grammar, the network places a premium on literacy and clarity of expression. It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal letters as art.

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.).