Hackers Slang

Overgeneralization. This is a very conspicuous feature of slang. It is computer terms that are used outside the computing context. Sometimes it becomes very amusing.

Thus hackers often grep [to rapidly scan a file or set of files looking for a particular pattern] for things rather than searching for them.

It took his name from the paper 'A General Regular Expression Parse'. 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. For example : 'porous' produces 'porosity'; 'generous' - 'generosity'; 'mysterious' - 'mysteriosity', 'obvious' - 'obviosity' etc.Another class of common construction uses the suffix '-itude' to abstract a quality from just any adjective to noun. For example: 'win' makes 'winnitude', 'loss' - 'lossitude'.

Some hackers cheerfully reserve this transformation; they argue, for example, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be called 'lats', because they are measuring latitude.

Also all the nouns can be 'verbed'. 'I'm grepping the files'

The suffix '-full' can also be applied in generalized and fanciful ways, as in '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. However hackers would never, for example, 'productize', 'prioritize', or 'securitize' things. Hackers have a strong aversion to bureaucratic regards.

Similarly, all verbs can be 'nouned'. This is only a slight overgeneralization in modern English; in hackish, however, it is good form to make them in some standard nonstandard way. Thus: 'win' makes 'winnitude', 'winnage'; 'disgust' - 'disgustitude'; 'hack' - 'hackification' etc.

Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural forms. For example 'mouse' in plural will be 'meeces'.

On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost everything ending in 'x' may form plurals in '-xen'. Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g. 'soxen' for a bunch of socks. This feature was signed not before the year 2000, thirty years after it might logically have come into usage; it has been suggested that this is because '-ix' and '-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract Latinate plural.

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 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 as the expense of clarity.

Spoken 'Inarticulations'. Very often hackers use words such as 'mumble', 'groan' and 'sigh' in unnatural places for these words. It has been suggested that this usage derives from the impossibility of representing computer noises (interestingly, the same sorts of constructions have been showing up in any 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 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 the computers talk to each other inside it, with intentions and desires. Thus, one hears 'the protocol handler got confused', or that the 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 explanation like '...and its poor little brain couldn't understand X, and it died.' Sometimes modeling things this way actually seems to make them easier to understand, perhaps because it is 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.

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 the contrary: hackers who anthromorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior.

In this view, almost all hackers subscribe that people are biological machines. This mind is implemented in machinery, which is not fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from computers.

Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that substance of silicon or metal, or water doesn't really matter; what matters, what makes the thing 'alive' is only information and richness of pattern. It implies that the humans and computers, and dolphins, and rocks are all machines exhibiting a various modes according to their information-processing capacity.Because hackers accept that a human can have intentions, it is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is mechanical, it is neither more or less absurd to say that 'The program wants to go into a infinite loop' than to say that 'I want to go eat some chocolate'.