560 lines
25 KiB
Plaintext
560 lines
25 KiB
Plaintext
Compiled by Guy L. Steele Jr. with assistance from
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the MIT AI community. Some definitions were taken
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from a compilation by Raphael Finkel with assistance
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from the SAIL community.
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Verb doubling: a standard construction is to double a verb
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and use it as a comment on what the implied subject does.
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Often used to terminate a conversation. Typical examples
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involve WIN, LOSE, HACK, FLAME, BARF, CHOMP:
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"The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose."
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"Mostly he just talked about his --- crock. Flame, flame."
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"Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!"
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Soundalike slang: similar to Cockney rhyming slang. Often made up
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on the spur of the moment.
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Standard examples:
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Boston Globe => Boston Glob
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Herald American => Horrid (Harried) American
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New York Times => New York Slime
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Dime Time => Slime Time
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government property - do not duplicate (seen on keys)
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=> government duplicity - do not propagate
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The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the
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syllable "P"; from the LISP convention of appending the letter "P"
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to denote a predicate (a Boolean-values function). The question
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should expect a yes/no answer, though it need not.
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At dinnertime: "Foodp?" "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry."
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"State-of-the-world-P?" (Straight) "I'm about to go home."
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(Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state."
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Peculiar nouns: MIT AI hackers love to take various words and add
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the wrong endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by following a
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standard rule to nonuniform cases. Examples:
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porous => porosity
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generous => generosity
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Ergo: mysterious => mysteriosity
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ferrous => ferocity
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Other examples: winnitude, disgustitude, hackification.
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AOS (aus (East coast) ay-ahs (West coast)) Based on a PDP-10
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increment instruction. v. To increase the amount of something:
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"Aos the campfire". usage: considered silly. See SOS.
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ARG n. Abbreviation for "argument" (to a function), used so often
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as to have become a new word.
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BAGBITER 1. n. Equipment or program that fails, usually
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intermittently. 2. adj. BAGBITING: failing hardware or software.
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"This bagbiting system won't let me get out of spacewar." usage:
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verges on obscenity. Grammatically separable: one may speak of
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"biting the bag". Synonyms: LOSER, LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS,
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BARFUCIOUS, CHOMPER, CHOMPING.
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BAR 1. The second metasyntactic variable, after FOO.
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"Suppose we have two functions FOO and BAR. FOO calls BAR..."
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2. Often appended to FOO to produce FOOBAR.
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BARF 1. interj. Term of disgust - see BLETCH.
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2. v. choke, as on input. May mean to give an error message.
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"The function = compares two fixnums or two flonums,
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and barfs on anything else."
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BARFULOUS, BARFUCIOUS adj. said of something which would
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make anyone barf, if only for aesthetic reasons.
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BLETCH from German "brechen", to vomit. (?) 1. interj. Term of
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disgust. 2. adj. BLETCHEROUS: disgusting in design or function.
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"This keyboard is bletcherous!". usage: slightly comic.
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BLT (blit, very rarely belt) Based on the PDP-10 block transfer
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instruction. Confusing to users of the PDP-11. 1. v. To transfer
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a large contiguous package of information from one place to
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another. 2. THE BIG BLT, n. Shuffling operation on the PDP-10
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under some operating systems that consumes significant computer
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time.
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BUCKY BITS (primarily Stanford) n. The bits produced by the CTRL
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and META shift keys on a Stanford (or Knight) keyboard.
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DOUBLE BUCKY adj. using both the CTRL and META keys.
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"The command to burn all LEDs is double bucky F."
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BUG Comes from telephone terminology: "bugs in a telephone cable",
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blamed for noisy lines. n. An unwanted and unintended property
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of a program. See "feature."
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BUM 1. v. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often
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at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more
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instructions." 2. n. A small change to an algorithm to make it
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more efficient. usage: somewhat rare.
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CDR (ku'der) From LISP. 1. v. with "down": to trace down a list of
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elements. "Shall we cdr down the agenda?". usage: silly.
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CHOMP v. To lose; to chew on something of which more was bitten off
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than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth. See BAGBITER.
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A hand gesture commonly accompanies this, consisting of the
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four fingers held together as if in a mitten or hand puppet,
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and the fingers and thumb open and close rapidly to illustrate
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a biting action. The gesture alone means CHOMP CHOMP (see Verb
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Doubling).
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CLOSE n. Abbreviation for "close (or right) parenthesis", used when
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necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. See OPEN.
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CONS From LISP. 1. v. To add a new element to a list. 2. v. CONS UP:
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To synthesize from smaller pieces: "to cons up an example".
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CRETIN 1. n. Congenital loser, q. v. 2. CRETINOUS adj. See
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"bletcherous" and "bagbiting". usage: somewhat ad hominem.
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CROCK n. An awkward feature or programming technique that ought to
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be made cleaner. example: To use small integers to represent
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error codes without the program interpreting them to the user is a
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crock.
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CRUFTY From "cruddy" adj. 1. Poorly built, possibly overly complex.
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"This is standard old crufty DEC software". Hence CRUFT, n.
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shoddy construction. 2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch,
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often with encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut
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butter and ketchup. Hence CRUFT, disgusting mess. 3. Generally
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unpleasant.
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Does CRUFT have anything to do with the Cruft Lab at Harvard?
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I don't know, though I was a Harvard student. - GLS
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DIKE From "diagonal cutters". v. To remove a module or disable it.
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"When in doubt, dike it out."
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DOWN 1. adj. Not working, as "The up escalator is down". 2. TAKE
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DOWN, BRING DOWN v. To deactivate, usually for repair work.
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See UP.
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DPB (duh-pib') From the PDP-10 instruction set.
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1. v. To plop something down in the middle.
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EPSILON from standard mathematical notation for a small quantity.
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1. n. A small quantity of anything. "The cost is epsilon."
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2. adj. Very small, negligible; less than marginal.
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"We can get this feature for epsilon cost."
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EXCH (ex'chuh, ekstch) From the PDP-10 instruction set.
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v. To exchange two things, each for the other.
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EXCL (eks'cul) Abbreviation for "exclamation point". See SEMI,
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OPEN, CLOSE.
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FAULTY 1. n. Same denotation as "bagbiting", "bletcherous",
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"losing", q. v., but the connotation is much milder.
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FEATURE 1. n. A surprising property of a program. Occasionally
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documented. To call a property a feature sometimes means that the
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author of the program did not consider the particular case, and
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the program makes an unexpected, although not strictly speaking an
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incorrect response. See "bug". "That's not a bug, that's a
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feature!" A bug can be changed to a feature by documenting it.
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2. A well-known and beloved property, a facility.
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Sometimes features are planned, but are called crocks
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by others. An approximately correct spectrum:
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BUG SCREW LOSS MISFEATURE CROCK KLUDGE WIN FEATURE PERFECTION
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(the last is never actually attained).)
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FENCEPOST ERROR n. The discrete equivalent of a boundary condition.
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Often exhibited in programs by iterative loops.
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From the following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet
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long with post ten feet apart, how many posts do you need?"
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FLAKEY 1. adj. Subject to frequent lossages. See "lossage".
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FLAME 1. v. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some
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relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently
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ridiculous attitude.
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FLAME ON - to continue to flame.
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FLAVOR n. 1. Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come
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in two flavors." 2. The attribute of
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causing something to be FLAVORFUL. "This convention
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yields additional flavor by allowing one to ..."
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FLAVORFUL adj. aesthetically pleasing.
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FLUSH v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous. "All that
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nonsense has been flushed". Standard ITS terminology for
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aborting an output operation. 2. to leave at the end
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of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for a meal):
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"I'm going to flush now", "Time to flush".
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FOO 1. from Yiddish "feh" or the Anglo-Saxon "fooey!" interj. Term
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of disgust. 2. Comes from FUBAR (Fucked up beyond all
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recognition), from WWII. Often seen as FOOBAR. name used for
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temporary programs, or samples of three letter names. Other
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similar words are BAR, BAZ (Stanford corruption of BAR), and
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rarely RAG. These have been used in Pogo as well. 3. Used very
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generally as a sample name for absolutely anything.
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The old SMOKEY STOVER comic strips often included the word FOO,
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in particular on license plates of cars.
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MOBY FOO - see MOBY.
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FROB 1. n. (MIT) The offical Tech Model Railroad Club definition
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is "FROB = protruding arm or trunnion", and by metaphoric
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extension any somewhat small thing. See FROBNITZ.
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2. v. abbreviated form of FROBNICATE.
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FROBNICATE 1. v. To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. Derived from
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FROBNITZ, q. v. Usually abbreviated to FROB. Thus one has the
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saying "To frob a frob".
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FROBNITZ, pl. FROBNITZEM (frob'nitsm) 1. n. An unspecified physical
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object, a widget. Also refers to electronic black boxes. This
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rare form is usually abbreviated to FROTZ, or more commonly to
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FROB.
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FROTZ 1. n. See FROBNITZ. 2. MUMBLE FROTZ, an interjection
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of very mild disgust.
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GARBAGE COLLECT v., GARBAGE COLLECTION n. See GC.
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GC From LISP terminology. 1. v. To clean up and throw away useless things.
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"I think I'll GC the top of my desk today."
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2. v. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use.
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3. n. An instantiation of the GC process.
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GLITCH From the Yiddish "glitshen", to slide. 1. n. A sudden
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interruption in electric service, sanity, or program function.
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Sometimes recoverable. 2. v. To commit a glitch.
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GOBBLE v. To consume or to obtain. GOBBLE UP tends to imply "consume",
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while GOBBLE DOWN tends to imply "obtain".
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"The output spy gobbles characters out of a TTY output buffer."
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"I guess I'll gobble down a copy of the documentation tomorrow."
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See SNARF.
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GRITCH See GLITCH.
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GRONK From the cartoon strip "B.C." 1. v. To clear the state of a
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wedged device and restart it. More severe than "to frob", q. v.
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2. To break. "The teletype scanner was gronked, so we took the
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system down." 3. GRONK OUT v. To cease functioning. Of people,
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to go home and go to sleep. "I guess I'll gronk out now; see
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you all tomorrow."
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HACK 1. n. Originally a quick job that produces what is needed, but
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not well. 2. The result of that job. 3. NEAT HACK: a clever
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technique. 4. REAL HACK: a crock, (occasionally affectionate) 5.
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v. with "together": to throw something together so it will work.
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6. to bear emotionally or physically. "I can't hack this heat!"
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7. v. To work on something (typically a program).
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In specific sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO."
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In general sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO."
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(The former is time-immediate, the latter time-extended.)
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More generally, "I hack x" is roughly equivalent to
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"x is my bag": "I hack solid-state physics".
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8. to HACK UP ON: to hack, but generally implies that the result
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is meanings 1-2.
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HAPPY HACKING - a farewell. HOW'S HACKING? - a friendly greeting
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among hackers. HACK HACK - a somewhat pointless but friendly
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comment, often used as a temporary farewell.
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HACKER Originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe. 1. n. A
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person who is good at programming quickly. Not everything a
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hacker produces is a hack. 2. An expert at a particular program,
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example: "A SAIL hacker". 3. A malicious or inquisitive meddler
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who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence
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"keyword hacker", "network hacker".
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HACKISH adj. Being or involving a hack. HACKISHNESS n.
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HAIR n. The complications which make something hairy.
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"Decoding TECO commands requires a certain amount of hair."
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HAIRY adj. 1. Overly complicated. "DWIM is incredibly hairy."
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2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy."
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3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or
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incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context:
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"He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about."
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HIRSUTE Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for HAIRY.
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HANDWAVE 1. v. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener;
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to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic.
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2. n. The act of handwaving. "Boy, what a handwave!"
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The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both
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hands up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane
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pivoting at the elbows and/or shoulders (depending on the magnitude
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of the handwave); alternatively, holding the forearms still
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while rotating the hands at the wrist to make them flutter.
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In context, the gestures alone can suffice as a remark.
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HARDWARILY adv. In a way pertaining to hardware. "The system
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is hardwarily unreliable." The adjective "hardwary" is NOT used.
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See SOFTWARILY.
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JFCL (djif'kl or djafik'l) Based on the PDP-10 instruction that acts
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as a fast no-op. v. To cancel or annul something. "Why don't
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you jfcl that out?"
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Once at the Museum of Science parking lot I saw a Vermont
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License plate JFCL. I wonder who owns it? - GLS
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JIFFY n. 1. Interval of CPU time, commonly 1/60 second or 1
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millisecond. 2. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever.
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"I'll do it in a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly
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never.
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JRST (jerst) Based on the PDP-10 jump instruction. 1. v. To
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suddenly change subjects. Rather rare. "Jack be nimble, Jack be
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quick; Jack jrst over the candle stick."
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KLUDGE (kloodj) alt: KLUGE. From the German "kluge", clever. 1. A
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Rube Goldberg device in hardware or software. 2. n. A clever
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programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an
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efficient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs.
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Often verges on being a crock. 3. Something that works for the
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wrong reason.
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LDB (lid'dib) From the PDP-10 instruction set.
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1. v. To extract from the middle.
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LINE STARVE (MIT) Inverse of LINE FEED.
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LOSE from MIT jargon 1. v. To fail. A program loses when it
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encounters an exceptional condition. 2. v. To be exceptionally
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unaesthetic. 3. Of people to be obnoxious or unusually stupid
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(as opposed to ignorant).
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One is said to DESERVE TO LOSE if one willfully does the wrong thing;
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humorously, if one uses a feature known to be marginal.
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What is meant is that one deserves the consequences of one's losing actions.
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"Boy, anyone who tries to use MULTICS deserves to lose!"
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LOSE LOSE - a reply or comment on a situation.
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LOSER n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or
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person. Especially "real loser".
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LOSS n. Something which loses. WHAT A (MOBY) LOSS! - interjection.
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LOSSAGE n. The result of a bug or malfunction.
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MAGIC adj. Something as yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain.
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(Someone (who was it?) said that magic was as yet not understood science.)
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"TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic bits."
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"This routine magically computes the parity of an eight-bit byte
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in three instructions."
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MARGINAL adj. 1. Extremely small. 2. Of extremely small merit.
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3. Of extremely small probability of winning.
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"A marginal increase in core can decrease GC time drastically."
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"This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me."
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"The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it crapped out."
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MARGINALLY adv. slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally
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better than at Small Eating Place."
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MISFEATURE n. A feature which eventually screws someone,
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possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation
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which has evolved. It is not the same as a bug because fixing
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it involve a gross philosophical change to the structure of the
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system involved. Often a former feature becomes a misfeature
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because a tradeoff was made whose parameters subsequently changed
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(possibly only in the judgement of the implementors).
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"Well, yeah, it's kind of a misfeature that file names are limited
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to six characters, but we're stuck with it for now."
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MOBY Seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago.
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Entered the world of AI with the Fabritek 256K moby memory of
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MIT-AI. Derived from Melville's "Moby-Dick" (some say from "Moby Pickle").
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1. adj. Large, immense, or complex. "A moby frob". 2. n. The
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maximum address space of a machine, hence 3. n. 256K words, the
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size of a PDP-10 moby. The maximum address space means the
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maximum normally addressable space, as opposed to
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the amount of physical memory a machine can have.
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Thus the MIT PDP-10's each have two mobies, usually
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referred to as the "low moby" (0-777777) and "high moby"
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(1000000-1777777), or as "moby 0" and "moby 1" (MIT-AI has
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four mobies of address space: moby 2 is the PDP-6 memory.
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and moby 3 the PDP-11 interface.)
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4. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually
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used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to
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a competent hacker. "So, moby Knight, how's the CONS machine doing?"
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MOBY FOO, MOBY WIN, MOBY LOSS - standard emphatic forms.
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FOBY MOO - a spoonerism due to Greenblatt.
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MODULO prep. Except for. From mathematical terminology: one can
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consider saying that 4 22 "except for the 9's" (4 22 mod 9).
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"Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that GC bug."
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MUMBLE 1. interj. Said when the correct response is either too
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complicated to enunciate or the speaker has not thought it out.
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Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general
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reluctance to get into a big long discussion. "Well, mumble."
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2. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement.
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"I think we should buy it." "Mumble!"
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Common variant: MUMBLE FROTZ.
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MUNCH v. Often confused with "mung", q. v. To transform information
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in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation.
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To trace down a data structure. Related to "crunch", as in
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"number-crunching".
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MUNG (variant: MUNGE) Recursive acronym for Mung Until No Good. 1.
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v. To make changes to a file, often large-scale, usually
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irrevocable. Occasionally accidental. See "blt". 2. v. To
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destroy.
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OPEN n. Abbreviation for "open (or left) parenthesis", used when
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necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the
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LISP form (DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say:
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"Open dee-fun foo, open eks close, open, plus ekx one, close close."
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See CLOSE.
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PHASE (of people) n. The phase of one's waking-sleeping schedule
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with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle. This is a useful
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concept among people who often work at night according to
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no fixed schedule. It is not uncommon to change one's phase
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by as much as six hours/day on a regular basis.
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"What's your phase?" "I've been getting in about 8 PM lately,
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but I'm going to work around to the day schedule by Friday."
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PHASE OF THE MOON n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which
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something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability
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of whatever is dependent. "This feature depends on having the
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channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on
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the phase of the moon."
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POP Based on the stack operation that removes the top of a stack, and
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the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on the stack.
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dialect: POPJ (pop-jay), based on the PDP-10 procedure return
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instruction. 1. v. To return from a digression.
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PUSH Based on the stack operation that puts the current information
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on a stack, and the fact that procedure call addresses are saved
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on the stack. dialect: PUSHJ (push-jay), based on the PDP-10
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procedure call instruction. 1. v. To enter upon a digression, to
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save the current discussion for later.
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QUUX Invented by Steele. Mythically, from the Latin semi-deponent
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verb QUUXO, QUUXARE, QUUXANDUM IRI; noun form variously
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QUUX (plural QUUCES, Anglicized to QUUXES) and QUUXU
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(genitive plural is QUUXUUM, four U's in seven letters).
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1. Originally, a meta-word like FOO and FOOBAR. Invented
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by Steele for precisely this purpose.
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2. Interjection: see FOO; however, denotes very little disgust,
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and is uttered mostly for the sake of the sound of it.
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3. n. Refers to one of three people who went to
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Boston Latin School and eventually to MIT:
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THE GREAT QUUX: Guy L. Steele Jr.
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THE LESSER QUUX: David J. Littleboy
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THE MEDIOCRE QUUX: Alan P. Swide
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(This taxonomy, I am told, is similarly applied
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to three Frankston brothers at MIT.)
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QUUX, without qualification, usually refers to
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The Great Quux, who is somewhat infamous for light verse
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and for the "Crunchly" cartoons.
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4. QUUXY adj. of or pertaining to a QUUX.
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SACRED adj. Reserved for the exclusive use of something
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(a metaphorical extension of the standard meaning).
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"Accumulator 7 is sacred to the UUO handler."
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Often means that anyone may look at the sacred object,
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but clobbering it will screw whatever it is sacred to.
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SEMI n. Abbreviation for "semicolon", when speaking.
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"Commands to GRIND are prefixed by semi-semi-star" means
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that the prefix is ";;*", not 1/4 of a star.
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SNARF v. To grab, esp. a large document or file for the purpose of
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using it either with or without the author's permission. See
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"blt". Variant: SNARF (IT) DOWN. (At MIT on ITS, DDT has a command
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called :SNARF which grabs a job from another (inferior) DDT.)
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SOFTWARILY adv. In a way pertaining to software. "The system
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is softwarily unreliable." The adjective "softwary" is NOT used.
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See HARDWARILY.
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SOS 1. n. A losing editor, SON OF STOPGAP. 2. v. Inverse of AOS,
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from the PDP-10 instruction set.
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SPAZZ 1. v. To behave spastically or erratically; more often,
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|
to commit a single gross error. "Boy, is he spazzing!"
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2. n. One who spazzes. "Boy, what a spazz!"
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3. n. The result of spazzing. "Boy, what a spazz!"
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STATE n. Condition, situation.
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"What's the state of NEWIO?" "It's winning away."
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"What's your state?" "I'm about to gronk out."
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As a special case, "What's the state of the world?"
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(or, more silly, "State-of-world-P?") means "What's new?"
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or "What's going on?"
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SUPERPROGRAMMER 1. n. See "wizard", "hacker". Usage: rare.
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(Becoming more common among IBM and Yourdon types.)
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SWAPPED v. From the use of secondary storage devices to implement
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virtual memory in computer systems. Something which is SWAPPED IN
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|
is available for immediate use in main memory, and otherwise
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is SWAPPED OUT. Often used metaphorically to refer to people's
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memories: "I read TECO ORDER every few months to keep the
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information swapped in."
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SYSTEM n. 1. The supervisor program on the computer. 2. Any
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large-scale program. 3. Any method or algorithm. 4. The way
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things are usually done. usage: A fairly ambiguous word. "You
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can't beat the system."
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SYSTEM HACKER: one who hacks the system (in sense 1 only -
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for sense 2 one mentions the particular program: LISP HACKEWR, e.g.)
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THEORY n. Used in the general sense of idea, plan, story, or set of rules.
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|
"What's the theory on fixing this TECO loss?"
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"What's the theory on dinner tonight?" ("Chinatown, I guess.")
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"What's the current theory on letting losers on during the day?"
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"The theory behind this change is to fix the following well-known screw..."
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TICK n. 1. Interval of time; basic clock time on the computer.
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Typically 1/60 second. See JIFFY.
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UP adj. 1. Working, in order. "The down escalator is up." 2. BRING
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UP v. To create a working version and start it. "They brought up
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|
a down system."
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USER n. Definition by RF:
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A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One
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|
who asks questions. Identified at MIT with "loser" by the
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spelling "luser".
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Definition by GLS:
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I don't agree with RF's definition at all.
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|
Basically, there are two classes of people who
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|
work with a program: there are implementors (hackers)
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|
and users (losers). The users are looked down on by hackers
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|
to a mild degree because they don't understand the full
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|
ramifications of the system in all its glory. (A few users
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|
who do are known as real winners.)
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It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Very
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|
often they are annoying or downright stupid.
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VANILLA adj. Ordinary flavor, standard. See FLAVOR.
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WALDO Used at Harvard, particularly by Tom Cheatham and students,
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|
instead of FOOBAR as a meta-syntactic variable and general nonsense
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|
word. See FOO, BAR, FOOBAR, QUUX.
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WEDGED from "head wedged up ass". adj. To be in a locked state,
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incapable of proceeding without help. (See "gronk"). Often
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|
refers to humans suffering misconceptions. "The swapper is
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|
wedged."
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WIN 1. v. MIT jargon. To win is to succeed. A program wins if no
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|
unexpected conditions arise. 2. BIG WIN n. serendipity.
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Emphatic forms: MOBY WIN, SUPER WIN, HYPER-WIN (often used interjectively
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|
as a reply). For some reason SUITABLE WIN is also common at MIT.
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|
See LOSE.
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WINNAGE 1. n. The situation when a lossage is corrected, or when
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|
something is winning. Quite rare.
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WINNER 1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer or
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|
person. 2. REAL WINNER: often sarcastic, but also used as high praise.
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WINNITUDE 1. n. The quality of winning (as opposed to WINNAGE, which is
|
|
the result of winning). "That's really great! Boy, what winnitude!"
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WIZARD n. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or
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|
hardware works; someone who can find and fix his bugs in an
|
|
emergency. Rarely used at MIT, where HACKER is the preferred term.
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