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

Question: "State-p Florida?"

Answer: "Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?"

Once, when Bill Gosper, a famous hacker, was at a Chinese restaurant with his friends, he wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" It is known to be one of the best hacks.

The most frequently used positive reply to a question using Îøèáêà! Çàêëàäêà íå îïðåäåëåíà.) is «T’, which is taken from the LISP terminology and means «true’. Some LISP hackers use `T' and `NIL' (New Implementation of LISP) instead of `Yes' and `No' almost reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings. For example, when a waiter or flight attendant asks whether a hacker wants coffee, he may absently respond `T', meaning that he wants coffee; but of course he will be brought a cup of tea instead.

2.1.4. Generalization

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 codes are applied to contexts outside of computing wherever hackers find amusing analogies to them. One of the best-known examples of generalization is that Unix hackers often grep (see the Glossary of Terms) for things rather than search for them.

Hackers enjoy generalization on the grammatical level as well. They add the wrong endings to various words and them make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to non-uniform cases (or vice versa).

E.g.: porous - porosity

generous - generosity

Hackers successfully generalize:

mysterious - mysteriosity

ferrous - ferrosity

obvious => obviosity

dubious => dubiosity

Another class of common construction uses the suffix `-itude' to abstract a quality from almost any adjective or noun. This usage arises especially in cases where mainstream English would perform the same abstraction through `-iness' or `-ingness'.

E.g. win => winnitude (a common exclamation)

loss => lossitude

cruft => cruftitude

lame => lameitude

Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation. For example, they argue, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be called `lats' because they measure latitude!

Also, hackers noun verbs.

E.g.: "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over".

This is only a slight overgeneralization in modern English that all verbs can be nouned. In hackish, however, it is good form to mark them in some nonstandard way.